A Poem for When You’re Feeling Weary

By Robin Bates | Published: April 4, 2024
Daniel Gabriel Rossetti, Proserpine


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Friday

As today is Algernon Charles Swinburne’s birthday, I share his best-known poem, which also might be considered an anti-spring poem. And that’s okay. Just because buds are bustin’ out all over doesn’t mean that we have to feel energized. In fact, T.S. Eliot considered April to be the cruelest month. After all, it breeds

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

So okay, I grant that Eliot’s preferred state here is one of emotional numbness—”Winter kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow.” Still there are those times when “the world is too much with us” (to quote Wordsworth) and we just want to  rest. I think of the final lines of Tennyson’s “Lotus Eaters”:

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;
O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.

Swinburne appears to be coming from a similar place in “The Garden of Proserpine.” Proserpine was the daughter of Ceres, goddess of the harvest, and was carried off to the kingdom of the dead by Pluto. When her mourning mother stopped growing crops, the gods pressured Pluto to release her. But because Proserpine had eaten six pomegranate seeds in the underworld, she had to stay there every six months of the year.

Swinburne’s speaker, on the other hand, appears to want to be there year-round. He is “tired of tears and laughter” and pretty much everything else associated with living. “Even the weariest river,” he writes, “winds somewhere safe to sea.” Here’s the poem:

The Garden of Proserpine
By Algernon Swinburne

Here, where the world is quiet;
        Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds’ and spent waves’ riot
         In doubtful dreams of dreams;
I watch the green field growing
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest-time and mowing,
         A sleepy world of streams.

I am tired of tears and laughter,
         And men that laugh and weep;
Of what may come hereafter
         For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
         And everything but sleep.

Here life has death for neighbour,
         And far from eye or ear
Wan waves and wet winds labour,
         Weak ships and spirits steer;
They drive adrift, and whither
They wot not who make thither;
But no such winds blow hither,
         And no such things grow here.

No growth of moor or coppice,
         No heather-flower or vine,
But bloomless buds of poppies,
         Green grapes of Proserpine,
Pale beds of blowing rushes
Where no leaf blooms or blushes
Save this whereout she crushes
         For dead men deadly wine.

Pale, without name or number,
         In fruitless fields of corn,
They bow themselves and slumber
         All night till light is born;
And like a soul belated,
In hell and heaven unmated,
By cloud and mist abated
         Comes out of darkness morn.

Though one were strong as seven,
         He too with death shall dwell,
Nor wake with wings in heaven,
         Nor weep for pains in hell;
Though one were fair as roses,
His beauty clouds and closes;
And well though love reposes,
         In the end it is not well.

Pale, beyond porch and portal,
         Crowned with calm leaves, she stands
Who gathers all things mortal
         With cold immortal hands;
Her languid lips are sweeter
Than love’s who fears to greet her
To men that mix and meet her
         From many times and lands.

She waits for each and other,
         She waits for all men born;
Forgets the earth her mother,
            The life of fruits and corn;
And spring and seed and swallow
Take wing for her and follow
Where summer song rings hollow
         And flowers are put to scorn.

There go the loves that wither,
         The old loves with wearier wings;
And all dead years draw thither,
         And all disastrous things;
Dead dreams of days forsaken,
Blind buds that snows have shaken,
Wild leaves that winds have taken,
         Red strays of ruined springs.

We are not sure of sorrow,
         And joy was never sure;
To-day will die to-morrow;
         Time stoops to no man’s lure;
And love, grown faint and fretful,
With lips but half regretful
Sighs, and with eyes forgetful
         Weeps that no loves endure.

From too much love of living,
         From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
         Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
         Winds somewhere safe to sea.

Then star nor sun shall waken,
         Nor any change of light:
Nor sound of waters shaken,
         Nor any sound or sight:
Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,
Nor days nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal
         In an eternal night.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud theorizes that there is a desire within cells to return to their previous inanimate state, a drive he called the death wish or Thanatos. This exists in tension with Eros, the life drive, with sometimes one predominant, sometimes the other. Swinburne’s poem can be seen as an homage to Thanatos.

I remember, in college, being drawn to “Garden of Proserpine” when I was at the end of an arduous semester and was feeling wrung out. Given all the pressure that I placed on myself, an inanimate state seemed pretty good to me. One of my favorite paintings has always been Daniel Gabriel Rossetti’s painting Proserpine, which was inspired by the poem and which hangs in our living room. In it one sees Proserpine almost defiantly biting into a pomegranate—like Eve biting into the apple—as though, like Swinburne’s speaker, she wants to remain.

I’m not recommending world-weary poems for all occasions. Sometimes, however, there’s consolation in finding a lyric that makes your exhaustion feel poetic.

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Vlad’s Black Riders, Trump’s Tell-Tale Heart

By Robin Bates | Published: April 3, 2024
Still from Lord of the Rings


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Thursday

Whenever a political columnist uses a literary allusion to illustrate a point, I grab onto it as a sign that literature still provides our culture with vibrant images with which to negotiate our troubled times. Recently blogger Greg Olear turned to J.R.R. Tolkien and Washington Irving to depict the workings of Vladimir Putin’s secret police. Meanwhile Armanda Marcotte of Salon compared an anxious Donald Trump to the narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

Olear sees Putin’s use of secret police as nothing new in Russian history:

From the days of Ivan IV in the late sixteenth century, Russia’s leaders have been extraordinarily ruthless about the application of terror to maintain power. The first secret state police, called the oprichnina, was devised by this first tsar, whom history knows as Ivan the Terrible. Black-clad patrolmen on black mounts descended on towns and villages, like a scene from J.R.R. Tolkien or Washington Irving, leaving death and destruction in their wake. 

Passages from The Fellowship of the Ring show us how Putin’s victims must feel when his henchmen come knocking. In the scene, Frodo and Sam are seeking to evade Sauron’s Nazgul or Black Riders:

Round the corner came a black horse, no hobbit-pony but a full-sized horse; and on it sat a large man, who seemed to crouch in the saddle, wrapped in a great black cloak and hood, so that only his boots in the high stirrups showed below; his face was shadowed and invisible.

When it reached the tree and was level with Frodo the horse stopped. The riding figure sat quite still with its head bowed, as if listening. From inside the hood came a noise as of someone sniffing to catch an elusive scent; the head turned from side to side of the road.

And further on:

The sound of hoofs stopped. As Frodo watched he saw something dark pass across the lighter space between two trees, and then halt. It looked like the black shade of a horse led by a smaller black shadow. The black shadow stood close to the point where they had left the path, and it swayed from side to side. Frodo thought he heard the sound of snuffling. The shadow bent to the ground, and then began to crawl towards him.

These scenes terrified me when I was a child.

Irving’s Ichabod Crane is riding a horse when he encounters his own black rider:

In the dark shadow of the grove, on the margin of the brook, he beheld something huge, misshapen and towering. It stirred not, but seemed gathered up in the gloom, like some gigantic monster ready to spring upon the traveler….On mounting a rising ground, which brought the figure of his fellow-traveler in relief against the sky, gigantic in height, and muffled in a cloak, Ichabod was horror-struck on perceiving that he was headless!—but his horror was still more increased on observing that the head, which should have rested on his shoulders, was carried before him on the pommel of his saddle! His terror rose to desperation; he rained a shower of kicks and blows upon Gunpowder, hoping by a sudden movement to give his companion the slip; but the specter started full jump with him. Away, then, they dashed through thick and thin; stones flying and sparks flashing at every bound. Ichabod’s flimsy garments fluttered in the air, as he stretched his long lank body away over his horse’s head, in the eagerness of his flight.

The German S.S. were probably Tolkien’s inspiration for the Nazgul. Frodo and Sam fortunately manage to escape their black riders but Crane, like far too many of Putin’s opponents, meets his demise.

Examining Donald Trump’s psychological response to his upcoming election interference/hush money trial, Marcotte concludes that he is running scared. She points out,

As the trial date nears, his already bizarre behavior is getting worse, like he’s the murderer in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” He posted 77 times on Truth Social on Easter, and that’s not even counting his threatening post depicting Joe Biden being kidnapped. 

In Poe’s story, the murderer thinks he has gotten away with killing his neighbor, at least at first, and converses “in a friendly way” with the visiting police officers. Soon, however, he begins to panic. If he were Trump, he would start manically texting:

 I soon wished that they would go. My head hurt and there was a strange sound in my ears. I talked more, and faster. The sound became clearer. And still they sat and talked.

Suddenly I knew that the sound was not in my ears, it was not just inside my head. At that moment I must have become quite white. I talked still faster and louder. And the sound, too, became louder. It was a quick, low, soft sound, like the sound of a clock heard through a wall, a sound I knew well. Louder it became, and louder. Why did the men not go? Louder, louder. I stood up and walked quickly around the room. I pushed my chair across the floor to make more noise, to cover that terrible sound. I talked even louder. And still the men sat and talked, and smiled. Was it possible that they could not hear??

Trump is not ravaged by guilt for his alleged election fraud (far from it!), but he certainly keeps speaking louder. With his long Truth Social messages, written in all-caps, and his increasingly unhinged accusations against the calmly talking and smiling Joe Biden, he does indeed sound like Poe’s narrator.

Now all we need is for him to break down and deliver some version of the narrator breaking down: “Yes! Yes, I killed him. Pull up the boards and you shall see! I killed him.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Trump suddenly came clean and admitted that he’s been lying all along about the election being stolen?

To feel the need to confess, however, one must first have a conscience.

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Caste in a Multicultural Democracy

By Robin Bates | Published: April 2, 2024
Ellis-Taylor as Wilkerson visiting India in Origins


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Wednesday

I’ve been so enthralled with the thesis of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents that Julia and I made sure we saw Origins, the film based on the book, when it appeared in theaters. By viewing America’s treatment of Blacks through the lens of the Dalits (a.k.a. the Untouchables) in India and the Jews in Nazi Germany, Wilkerson clarifies how racism works in the United States. Sadly, if race operates as a caste, then it is much more deeply entrenched in the American psyche than many liberals, including me, have assumed.

To illustrate Wilkerson’s point, in today’s post I feature a poem by Langston Hughes and passages from Huckleberry Finn and Arundhati Roy’s Booker-winning God of Small Things.

Among other things, caste helps explain why impoverished immigrants coming to the United States didn’t feel an automatic kinship with oppressed groups already here. It’s understandable why people would have adopted America’s caste system upon entry: suddenly a big part of your identity is someone else being at the bottom rung of the status ladder.

To focus on one group, the Irish for centuries were treated like dirt by the British, and at first many Irish immigrants found life not a lot better when they immigrated to America. Indeed, many were treated worse than African slaves since, in monetary terms, their lives were worth less. After all, they weren’t prize chattel. But at least they could regain some self-respect by their white skin, a dynamic that is explored in Noel Ignatiev’s study How the Irish Became White.

The poor Whites that I grew up with in segregated Appalachian Tennessee—many of Scotch and Irish descent—were more openly and vocally racist than the rich Whites, more likely to use the n-word and engage in direct violence. (Upper class racism was more subtle, as Harper Lee shows in her sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird.) Hughes pours contempt on these poor Whites in his poem “Ku Klux”:

They took me out
To some lonesome place.
They said, “Do you believe
In the great white race?”

I said, “Mister,
To tell you the truth,
I’d believe in anything
If you’d just turn me loose.”

The white man said, “Boy,
Can it be
You’re a-standin’ there
A-sassin’ me?”

They hit me in the head
And knocked me down.
And then they kicked me
On the ground.

A klansman said, “Nigger,
Look me in the face —
And tell me you believe in
The great white race.”

 I think also of the racist rant from Irish descendant “Pap” Finn in Huckleberry Finn:

Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there from Ohio—a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane—the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? They said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could vote when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was ’lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I’ll never vote agin. Them’s the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me—I’ll never vote agin as long as I live. And to see the cool way of that nigger—why, he wouldn’t a give me the road if I hadn’t shoved him out o’ the way. I says to the people, why ain’t this nigger put up at auction and sold?—that’s what I want to know. And what do you reckon they said? Why, they said he couldn’t be sold till he’d been in the State six months, and he hadn’t been there that long yet. There, now—that’s a specimen. They call that a govment that can’t sell a free nigger till he’s been in the State six months. Here’s a govment that calls itself a govment, and lets on to be a govment, and thinks it is a govment, and yet’s got to set stock-still for six whole months before it can take a hold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free nigger, and—

Regarded as trash by the Judge Thatchers of the world, Pap salvages some self-dignity thanks to America’s caste system. If you want to understand the irrational hatred that many Whites had for Barack Obama—a hatred that propelled birther-spouting Donald Trump to the White House—look no further. Many of the Pap Finns who voted for him in 2016 were voting for the first time in their lives.

Now, I want to be clear there are plenty of Irish descendants who are not racist, starting with my wife, who broke free of the prejudices of her mother. The problems of caste, furthermore, extend far beyond the Irish. When Julia and I spent a year in rural Minnesota after graduating from Carleton College, I encountered anti-Black racism in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and German descendants—which was a shock since I had gone north hoping to escape such prejudice. Even though there were few if any Blacks in the area, my first boss told me a racist joke on my first day and my second boss informed me that Blacks were little better than animals.

This is the point of Wilkerson’s book: the American caste system has always been available to anyone that wanted to make use of it because that’s how caste works. Democrats are currently worried about certain Latinos, especially white Latinos, gravitating to Donald Trump’s white supremacist views. If they are in fact doing so, they are traveling a well-worn path.

I don’t know a lot about India’s caste system, but God of Small Things shows me just how deep caste systems reach. In this tragic novel about an upper-class woman who falls in love with an Untouchable and sees the lives of herself, the man, and her children destroyed in the process, the author at one point reflects on where the tragedy begins. One answer is thousands of years earlier:

It could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before the Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendency, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin’s conquest of Calicut. Before three purple-robed Syrian Bishops murdered by the Portuguese were found floating in the sea, with coiled sea serpents riding on their chests and oysters knotted in their tangled beards. It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag.

That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.

America finally got rid of its own miscegenation laws in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, but that hasn’t made the beliefs go away.

In an excruciating scene, Roy shows us the violence that is used to prop up caste. “Touchable Policemen” have tracked down the kindly Velutha, Ammu’s lover, and while Ammu’s horrified twins watch from the shadows, they beat him to death. The author shows the violence comes less from the men than from the caste system:

The twins were too young to know that these were only history’s henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilization’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness.

Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.

Man’s Needs.

By adding sexism and classism into the mix, Roy shows that caste is not the only dynamic at work. Her novel shows how far the power structure will go to maintain power. As she explains,

What Esthappen and Rahel witnessed that morning, though they didn’t know it then, was a clinical demonstration in controlled conditions (this was not war after all, or genocide) of human nature’s pursuit of ascendancy. Structure. Order. Complete monopoly. It was human history, masquerading as God’s Purpose, revealing herself to an under-age audience.

There was nothing accidental about what happened that morning. Nothing incidental. It was no stray mugging or personal settling of scores. This was an era imprinting itself on those who lived in it.

History in live performance.

Further emphasizing how the killing is systemic rather than individual, Roy writes of the policemen,

If they hurt Velutha more than they intended to, it was only because any kinship, any connection between themselves and him, any implication that if nothing else, at least biologically he was a fellow creature—had been severed long ago. They were not arresting a man, they were exorcising fear. They had no instrument to calibrate how much punishment he could take. No means of gauging how much or how permanently they had damaged him.

Roy’s book is brilliant in part because it shows how inexorable the process is. If the central characters worship “the god of small things,” it’s in part because the big gods are not there for them. To borrow the title of Jean Cocteau’s Oedipus play, when there’s an “infernal machine” grinding them down, they find solace in small acts of love, which become everything to them. If it’s useless to worry about tomorrow, one lives day to day.

And if, in the process, one violates love laws—not only caste and miscegenation laws but also (in the case of the twins) incest laws—well, where else is comfort to be found? Unfortunately, the system makes sure the lawbreakers pay a horrendous price, which it does in a cold and efficient manner:

Unlike the custom of rampaging religious mobs or conquering armies running riot, that morning in the Heart of Darkness the posse of Touchable Policemen acted with economy, not frenzy. Efficiency, not anarchy. Responsibility, not hysteria. They didn’t tear out his hair or burn him alive. They didn’t hack off his genitals and stuff them in his mouth. They didn’t rape him. Or behead him.

After all they were not battling an epidemic. They were merely inoculating a community against an outbreak.

America’s increasingly multicultural society is seeing far too many of these inoculation attempts. The liberal hope has been that Americans would come to embrace the pluralistic dream once they got to know each other, with Inclusion, Diversity, and Equality programs helping the process along. And in truth, there has been significant progress.

Unfortunately, we may have underestimated the staying power of caste and the extent to which certain fellow citizens are impelled by primal feelings “born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear.”

Further thought: Given the pessimism in today’s post, I should add that millions of immigrant descendants—which includes everyone other than Native Americans and those who were brought here by force—are appalled by caste racism. While caste helps explain why Trump has been as successful as he has been, millions of White Americans will still vote against him in the upcoming election.

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Bridges and the American Dream

By Robin Bates | Published: April 1, 2024
Brooklyn Bridge in the 1930s


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Tuesday

Baltimore’s Key Bridge catastrophe, brought about when a container ship destroyed a section by colliding with one of the pilings, has me thinking about Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1933). The poet’s ambitious and challenging epic uses the Brooklyn Bridge to symbolize the spirit of the American Dream.

Opened in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge was an astounding achievement, seeming proof of America’s aspirational greatness. This raises the question of whether we can still dream soaring dreams. Even as Joe Biden promises federal aid to restore the Baltimore bridge as soon as possible, the GOP’s “harpies of the shore” (to borrow a phrase from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “Old Ironsides”) are threatening to deny funding. Meanwhile, some MAGAts are blaming both Biden and diversity policies for the disaster.

Because “To Brooklyn Bridge,” which functions as a prologue to Crane’s poem, is often obscure, I’ll walk you through it. It begins with the image of a soaring seagull looking down at the bridge, which seems to chain the waters below. The bird appears as a brief apparition to office workers in skyscrapers, perhaps reminding them that we are a nation of dreamers. In fact, this dreaming takes them to movie theaters time and again:

To Brooklyn Bridge (prologue to The Bridge)

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes   
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
—Till elevators drop us from our day …

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen…

As I read these lines, I think of the opening passage from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God:

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Crane, however, has not turned his eyes away in resignation. Rather, he sees the Bridge as a symbol of tangible hope, at least for some. The sun that moves across it, turning it silver, leaves some of its energy with it. The bridge may be stationary and yet it seems to soar freely:

And Thee, across the harbor, silver paced
As though the sun took step of thee yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

I say “for some” because Crane then mentions a mad man who commits suicide by leaping from its heights. Not all American stories are happy ones and Crane himself in the near future will commit suicide in similar fashion, leaping off the back of a boat. Yet even this instance speaks to the bridge’s mesmerizing power:

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

This is only a temporary interlude, however. Shining through the bridge’s girders is the sun (“the sky’s acetylene”), casting rip-tooth shadows onto Wall Street. And while the cargo-loading derricks turn under a cloudy sky, the bridge’s cables “breathe the North Atlantic still,” which I’m reading as partaking of and embodying the awesome power of nature. The bridge may be made by humans for commercial purposes, but it channels something greater:

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky’s acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud flown derricks turn …
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

The bridge radiates not only natural force but spiritual mystery (“the heaven of the Jews”). The anonymous masses of New York feel their power as they are lifted up and redeemed by the structure, which the poet comes to see as a great musical instrument. When Crane describes the Brooklyn Bridge as “harp and altar,” I think of the importance that Romantic poets like Percy Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge attached to aeolian harps, which use the wind’s power to create art. Crane sees the bridge’s music attracting prophets, outcasts, and lovers (he himself regarded himself as all three):

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon … Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry…

At night, as car headlamps outline the bridge with a string of luminescent beads, Crane senses that it is lifting up the night itself in its arms. And then later, after all the city lights have gone out (“the City’s fiery parcels all undone”), he experiences the full shadow of the bridge. His observation that snow is submerging “an iron year” hints, once again, that something about the bridge is redemptive. As prophet, outcast, and lover himself, he is being lifted above his hard and unforgiving iron existence:

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path—condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City’s fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year …

And indeed the bridge—this “immaculate sigh of stars”—is a constant presence. It’s as though, by vaulting sea and looking out towards the western prairies, it connects the high and the low, the sky and the sod. Caught up in the sweep and curve of the cables, the poet feels that God has been given a new myth. We call that myth the American Dream:

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,         
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

I grant that Baltimore’s Key Bridge is nothing like the Brooklyn Bridge, which is an architectural as well as an engineering marvel. Nevertheless, our current challenge begs the question of whether America is still capable of lending a myth to God.

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On Hummingbirds and…Menstruation?!

By Robin Bates | Published: March 31, 2024
Ruby-throated hummingbird

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Monday

Someone has just written to our local newspaper, the Sewanee Mountain Messenger, about the year’s first hummingbird sighting. This gives me an excuse to share a fun hummingbird poem, written by Beth Ann Fennelly (thanks to Jonathan Rebec for alerting me to it).

Though Fennelly is more focused on the last hummingbird rather than the first, she points to the entire seasonal cycle. We gasp when we see the first one, appearing as a stereotyped picture of happiness—“hands clasped, like a child actor instructed to show joy.” And then there are the midsummer swarms, when I’ve counted as many as ten hummingbirds at our feeders. A collection of hummingbirds is called a “charm” or a “hover” and sometimes a “troubling.” To me, however, they sometimes resemble a swarm of large mosquitoes.

What distinguishes the last hummingbird is that we never know that it’s the last. The poet observes that there’s “no telling, and no tell”: we think we have seen the last one and then there’s another one and so on until, finally, there really are no more.

At this point in the poem, Fennelly shocks us with a dramatic and unexpected comparison: to menstruation! Just as the hummingbird appearances go through a cycle, so does a woman’s period. While the first is like the angel Gabriel appearing to Mary (with the poet, for good measure, throwing in an allusion to Judy Blume’s teen classic about periods, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret), the last is like “your last, perhaps, or next-to-last, your no-long-very-monthly monthly.”

And just as “your body’s eggy miracle” has been “unneeded now for years,” so the uncertainty surrounding hummingbird departures leads to sugar water being wasted. (“Why fill and dump and fill again the undrunk sugar water?” Fennelly asks. “Enough. Let’s progress to whatever season’s next.”)

And yet, one doesn’t want to progress without some “farewell ritual.” She imagines the last hummingbird, in its departure, dipping its wing, as pilots sometimes do to indicate a final farewell.

The Last Hummingbird of Summer
By Beth Ann Fennelly

reveals itself in retrospect. Unlike the first,
whose March arrival bade you gasp, hands clasped,
like a child actor instructed to show joy, when the last
departs for points south, there’s no telling,
and no tell. Well, so what? You know their cycle.
In August, they swarm the feeder, all swagger,
greedy tussle for sugar water. Suddenly,
September. Chill tickles your ankles. You reach
for long sleeves and you fret. They’ve left? Not yet.
Ear cocked for the symphony’s shrinking strings.
Then comes a day without a ruby flash. Next day,
they’re back. Next day, there’s one. Then none.
Or maybe one? From porches, pumpkins grin.
Your last had left, and left you uninformed.

Kinda? Sorta? Can I say it?—like menstrual blood,
again, between your legs. Your last, perhaps,
or next-to-last, your no-longer-very-monthly
monthly. So unlike your first crimson, at twelve,
its “Yes-You-Are-There-God” annunciation.
Well, so what? You know the cycle. Your body’s
eggy miracle, unneeded now for years.
And you hate waste. Why fill and dump
and fill again the undrunk sugar water?
Enough. Let’s progress to whatever season’s next.
But still, a farewell ritual wouldn’t be amiss.
The last hummingbird of summer, zinging
from the feeder—to others, a smooth departure—
to you, alone, unmistakably, dipping its wing.

Whenever I read a poem like this, I think of how poet Lucille Clifton gave women permission to write about their bodies, starting with “homage to my hips” (early 1970s) and eventually moving on to lyrics like “poem in praise of menstruation” and “wishes for sons.” I love her own farewell poem “to my last period”:

well, girl, goodbye,
after thirty-eight years.
thirty-eight years and you
never arrived
splendid in your red dress
without trouble for me
somewhere, somehow. 

now it is done,
and i feel just like the grandmothers who,
after the hussy has gone,
sit holding her photograph
and sighing, wasn’t she
beautiful? wasn’t she beautiful?

So which should one be more sentimental about, the last hummingbird or one’s last period? Not being a woman, I’ll let others answer that one.

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Radical Hope, Love’s Secret Discipline

By Robin Bates | Published: March 30, 2024
Picasso, Mother and Child

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Sunday – Easter

After my eldest son died, one of my colleagues—a national authority on colonial Puritan poetry—quietly assured me that love was more powerful than death. Although poets have been telling me this all my life, it resonated particularly powerfully at that moment. The two poems I have chosen for today’s Easter post make this their focus.

First, there’s Scott Cairns’s “The Death of Death,” the title of which reminds one of John Donne’s defiant declaration, “Death, thou shalt die!” Cairns uses fertility image to accentuate his point:

The Death of Death
By Scott Cairns

Put fear aside.
Now that He has entered
into death on our behalf,
all who live
no longer die
as men once died.

That ephemeral occasion
has met its utter end.
As seeds cast to the earth, we
will not perish, but like those seeds
shall rise again—the shroud
of death itself having been
burst to tatters
by love’s immensity.

Powerful though we know love to be, however, thinking of it as triumphant still requires us to engage in an act of the imagination that takes us beyond what Brazilian philosopher and poet Rubem Alves calls “the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress.”

“Reality is is more complex than realism wants us to believe,” Alves writes, adding, “the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual.”

Alves has one sentiment that shows up also in Wendell Berry’s poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” Berry writes,

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

For his part Rebem writes,

Let us plant dates
even though those who plant them
will never eat them.

Think of this as radical hope and the foundation of faith:

We must live by the love of what we will never see.
This is the secret discipline.

Here’s the poem:

What is Hope?
By Rubem Alves

What is hope?
It is a presentiment that imagination is more real
and reality less real than it looks.
It is a hunch
that the overwhelming brutality of facts
that oppress and repress is not the last word.
It is a suspicion
that reality is more complex
than realism wants us to believe
and that the frontiers of the possible
are not determined by the limits of the actual
and that in a miraculous and unexpected way
life is preparing the creative events
which will open the way to freedom and resurrection….
The two, suffering and hope, live from each other.
Suffering without hope
produces resentment and despair,
hope without suffering
creates illusions, naiveté, and drunkenness….
Let us plant dates
even though those who plant them
will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see.
This is the secret discipline.
It is a refusal to let the creative act
be dissolved in immediate sense experience
and a stubborn commitment to the future of our grandchildren.
Such disciplined love
is what has given prophets, revolutionaries and saints
the courage to die for the future they envisaged.
They make their own bodies
the seed of their highest hope.

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Moscow’s Terror Attack and Big Brother

By Robin Bates | Published: March 28, 2024
Photo by @AZemlianichenko

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Friday

The horrific terrorist attack against a Moscow rock concert last Friday has drawn a predictable response from Vladimir Putin. Although it was apparently a plot by ISIS extremists, Russia’s dictator is blaming whom you would expect. In other words, like Big Brother in 1984, Putin’s political goals, not facts on the ground, are determining whom Russians are supposed to hate.

Authoritarianism expert Tim Snyder, who the day after the attack predicted that this would happen, explains the reasons:

What was entirely predictable (and predicted) was that, regardless of the facts, Putin and his propagandists would place the blame for the attack on Ukraine and the United States.  If Ukraine and the West are guilty, then Russian security services do not have to explain why they failed to stop Islamic terrorists from killing so many Russians, because Islamic terror vanishes from the story.  And if Ukrainians are to blame, then this would seem to justify the war that Russia is prosecuting against Ukraine.

Early in Orwell’s novel a public venting, known as “the Hate,” is directed against Eurasia, with which Oceania is at war:

Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face [of Goldstein] on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne…

The film, and the hate, continue until Big Brother appears to reassure everyone that he has everything under control:

Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards in their seats. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio’d, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen.  

Winston Smith, however, is aware of how the hate object has little to do with objective reality since, a mere four years earlier, Eurasia had been an Oceania ally:

Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible. 

While Putin continues his all-out assault on Ukraine, however, there is one silver lining, albeit a tiny one. According to Snyder, Russia’s leader no longer has his former ability to calm the Russian people:

When he went on television to accuse Ukraine, he was no longer the nimble post-truth Putin who is capable of changing out one lie for another as necessary, with a wink to the insider along the way.  This now seems to be a Putin who actually believes what he says — or, in the best case, lacks the creativity to react to events in the world.  His speech yesterday was grim for everyone, including to Russians who would like to think that their leader is ahead of events. 

In other words, Putin’s “Hate” did not conclude with “a deep sigh of relief from everybody.” And if Russians think that their dictator can no longer keep them safe, then he will have lost one of the major mainstays of his power.

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Beware Freeing an Authoritarian Gulliver

By Robin Bates | Published: March 27, 2024
Illus. from Gulliver’s Travels

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Thursday

On Monday night MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow made a nice literary allusion when she noted that authoritarian types fantasize about a dictator strongman breaking free of Lilliputian ropes. She was referring, of course, to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver, who is bound to the ground by the tiny citizens of Lilliput after being shipwrecked. There’s a lot to unpack in Gulliver’s Travels—Swift is in my opinion the GOAT of political satirists—but let’s first look at this particular fantasy.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder, one of our foremost experts on authoritarianism, explains that while people may dream of a strongman uniting the nation and getting things done, the reality is far different. Dictatorial power today, he writes, “is not about achieving anything positive.  It is about preventing anyone else from achieving anything.  The strongman is really the weak man: his secret is that he makes everyone else weaker.”

This is why conditions inevitably deteriorate under authoritarian rule. “Unaccountable to the law and to voters,” Snyder writes,

the dictator has no reason to consider anything beyond his own personal interests.  In the twenty-first century, those are simple: dying in bed as a billionaire.  To enrich himself and to stay out of prison, the strongman dismantles the justice system and replaces civil servants with loyalists.

Basically, people think that strong men (and it’s usually men) will work for them whereas in reality they work only for themselves. Everyone else is expendable, including their loyal followers.

I recommend reading the entire article, which gives a grim account of how societies spiral downward under the rule of such people. Snyder has seen the work of strongmen up close so he knows what he’s talking about. But I want to turn now to what Swift adds to the conversation.

Gulliver’s Travels is composed of four books in which Gulliver recounts his experiences in (1) the land of the Lilliputians, (2) the land of the gigantic Brogdingnags, (3) a hodgepodge of fantastical locales, and (4) the land of the Houyhnhnms, who are highly intelligent horses that have subjugated bestial humans. After Gulliver is tied down by the Lilliputians, the question arises why Gulliver allows himself to be dictated to when he so clearly has a size advantage. To be sure, he swears allegiance to the Lilliputian emperor while he is still bound, but authoritarians would see him as gullible (the origin for his name) for not taking advantage of his power.

And indeed, he has violent impulses. Take, for instance, the moment when Lilliputians are clambering over his body:

I confess I was often tempted, while they were passing backwards and forwards on my body, to seize forty or fifty of the first that came in my reach, and dash them against the ground. But the remembrance of what I had felt [being shot with tiny arrows], which probably might not be the worst they could do, and the promise of honor I made them—for so I interpreted my submissive behavior—soon drove out these imaginations. Besides, I now considered myself as bound by the laws of hospitality, to a people who had treated me with so much expense and magnificence. 

This talk of honor and the laws of hospitality sounds almost quaint in the wake of the Trump years. One reason why Trump has had such a toxic effect on American politics is because of his readiness to cast aside any norms and conventions that stand in his way. Trump has provided a permission structure for his fans to entertain—and even to act out—secret desires that they have previously suppressed.

To be sure, the GOP had been going this way for a while now. I think of Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich shattering Congressional protocol in the 1990s, of the Bush-Cheney presidency engaging in preemptive war and torture, of Senate Majority Lead Mitch McConnell violating traditional practices regarding filibusters and judicial confirmations.

Trump, however, accelerated the process. When his supporters commend this non-stop liar for his truth-telling, they are referring to how he speaks to their base desires, which feel true to them. Sometimes their response is to quietly cheer, sometimes to directly insult perceived enemies (whether on-line or in person), sometimes to engage in violence.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud famously explains how civilization relies on a certain suppression of instinctive hungers in order to operate, even while the suppression results in discontent. Gulliver is willing to submit to civilization’s restraints—he has been well-trained—whereas populist authoritarians rise to power on the promise that they will banish discontent and give the people what they crave. In the minds of their followers, why settle for irritating governance and messy politics when someone is offering to make your dreams come true? In reality, however, only those at the top get what they want.

In Gulliver’s Travels, the Lilliputians are fortunate that Gulliver doesn’t use his power, even after the Emperor condemns him to be blinded for trumped up charges. Instead, Gulliver runs away, and even then he’s apologetic about not following the nation’s laws. (“At last I fixed upon a resolution, for which it is probable I may incur some censure, and not unjustly…”) Meanwhile, Swift will go on the mention other authoritarian excesses in his work, whether it be the flying island of Laputa hovering over rebellious populations (thereby cutting off sunlight and rain) or the Houyhnhnms initiating genocidal slaughter against the Yahoos. Swift is no democrat but he recognizes the evils of autocracy when he sees them.

The author would rather have us emulate the giant king of the Brobdignags, who has a strong ethical compass. When Gulliver offers to teach him how to make gunpowder, he is horrified.

Returning to the Lilliputian ropes, the next time you fret about the inefficiencies of electoral democracy, messy political compromises, onerous regulations, waffling politicians, the slowness of the courts, or having to choose between the lesser of two evils, recall that the alternative may be an unleashed Gulliver who will stomp on you if you get in his way.

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Joe Biden as Old Father William

By Robin Bates | Published: March 26, 2024
Tenniel, illustration of Old Father William

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Wednesday

Having recently applied Lewis Carroll’s Alice books to Donald Trump’s legal woes (see yesterday’s post), today I apply one of Carroll’s Alice poems to his opponent. Much has been made of Joe Biden’s advanced age—as though Donald Trump isn’t just three years younger and unhealthier to boot—but the president has started pushing back. The Carroll poem I’ve chosen for today is about another elderly man responding similarly.

Biden began changing perceptions with his combative State of the Union address, where it became clear to most that he is not the doddering old fool many had claimed him to be. In fact, after Trump last week angrily blamed Biden for a case brought by a Manhattan prosecutor (in other words, not under Biden’s jurisdiction), the Biden camp turned the tables, replying

 Donald Trump is weak and desperate—both as a man and a candidate for President…. His campaign can’t raise money, he is uninterested in campaigning outside his country club, and every time he opens his mouth, he pushes moderate and suburban voters away with his dangerous agenda.

America deserves better than a feeble, confused, and tired Donald Trump.

Some have opined that Biden’s superpower is that his foes underestimate him. Maybe it’s because of his stutter or his gaffes but, repeatedly, they are stunned when he turns their attacks against them. When “Fuck Joe Biden” became transmuted, with a nod and a wink, to “Let’s go Brandon”—an indirect way of insulting the president—he embraced the appellation with the meme of “Dark Brandon,” a superhero often sporting dark glasses or x-ray eyes. Biden has also embraced “Bidenomics”—once a term of derision—as a compliment. It’s not unlike how Barack Obama embraced “Obamacare,” which since its rocky start has become wildly popular.

So think of Biden as Carroll’s Father William, who self-deprecatingly fields questions from a judgmental young man until he’s finally had enough. In each case, he turns the criticisms into a strength:

“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,
    “And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
    Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

“In my youth,” Father William replied to his son,
    “I feared it might injure the brain;
But now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,
    Why, I do it again and again.”

“You are old,” said the youth, “as I mentioned before,
    And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door—
    Pray, what is the reason of that?”

“In my youth,” said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
    “I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment—one shilling the box—
    Allow me to sell you a couple.”

“You are old,” said the youth, “and your jaws are too weak
    For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak—
    Pray, how did you manage to do it?”

“In my youth,” said his father, “I took to the law,
    And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
    Has lasted the rest of my life.”

“You are old,” said the youth, “one would hardly suppose
    That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose—
    What made you so awfully clever?”

“I have answered three questions, and that is enough,”
    Said his father; “don’t give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
    Be off, or I’ll kick you down stairs!”

This question-answer session reminds me of the time in February when a special counsel, tasked with deciding whether Biden should be charged for possession of governmental documents, claimed that he had forgotten when his son Beau died, when he was vice president, when his term ended, and when his term began. Pressed by reporters about these matters, the president replied, “I’m well-meaning and I’m an elderly man and I know what the hell I’m doing. I’ve been president, I put this country back on its feet.”

Later, resorting to sarcasm, he barked,

My memory’s fine. My memory’s — take a look at what I’ve done since I became president. … How did that happen? I guess I just forgot what was going on.

It was his version of, “Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff? Be off, or I’ll kick you downstairs!”

Further thought: Carroll’s poem is a parody of Robert Southey’s “The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them,” written at a time when our elders were more respected than they are today and which you can read here. I have two thoughts about the Southey poem. On the one hand, it actually describes Biden, who has indeed matured into a rich old age by (1) abusing not his health or vigor, (2) maintaining a humane perspective on life, and (3) remembering his God. Here are the final two stanzas:

You are old, Father William, the young man cried,
⁠And life must be hastening away;
You are cheerful, and love to converse upon death!
⁠Now tell me the reason I pray.

I am cheerful, young man, Father William replied,
⁠Let the cause thy attention engage;
In the days of my youth I remember’d my God!
⁠And He hath not forgotten my age.

Biden would sound as insufferably sanctimonious as Southey’s Father William if he talked this way. The self-satisfied preachiness is why the poem lends itself so readily to Carroll’s comic parody. Better for Biden to jerk the chains of the insistent young reporters before dismissing them.

Oh, and I suspect that Biden’s sense of humor, so much like that of Lewis Carroll, is another superpower against a rival who takes himself utterly seriously. There’s nothing like laughter to deflate a self-important authoritarian.

It’s as though the president has taken Carroll’s Father William as his model.

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