Yeats and Trump

Early Saturday morning (1/24/26) in Minneapolis, Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, another American citizen and innocent victim of Trump’s immigration crackdown. Trying to cover-up this murder, the administration immediately began lying about the victim. Greg Bovino lied, claiming Pretti was “an individual [who] wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Trump’s henchman, Stephen Miller tweeted that “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat[ic] account sides with the terrorist” and “have been fanning the flames of insurrection.” Trump blamed Gov. Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey for Pretti’s death.

Hannah Arendt once wrote: “The liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality.” These days, “the immensity of factuality” arrives in the form of cell phone videos, which we all can view. Against the irrefutable visual evidence of Pretti’s killing, Trump and his fellow liars try to rewrite reality by flooding the media with a stream of lies and, no doubt, those falsehoods will be accepted by fanatical followers and those too lazy to watch the videos and be honest with themselves.

Some writers, lawyers, and American citizens are worried the U.S. is lurching toward civil war. At the University of Penn (ironically Trump’s alma mater) Clare Finkelstein, a professor at the law school, “warned that Minnesota is now uncomfortably close to that trajectory.” Before Trump unleashed ICE on American cities, the notion that civil war could erupt in America struck me as simply impossible. Now, unfortunately, Trump and his administration are fueling that possibility.

During the Irish Civil War (1922-1923), William Butler Yeats witnessed the violence and killing the Irish perpetrated against one another after together they had succeeded in fighting and fending off a superior foe, the British. Heartbroken by the destruction and death civil war ignited, Yeats wrote seven poems collected under the title, “Meditations in Time of Civil War.” One poem, “The Stare’s Nest by My Window” seems pertinent to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti:

The Stare's Nest by My Window

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening, honey-bees
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare

A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; oh, honey-bees
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Yeats’s poem is a lament against the violence and death the fighting between the Pro-treaty forces and anti-treaty forces caused. He wrote the poem during the civil war. His call to the bees to build a hive in the “loosening masonry” of his home is a metaphor for both sides of the conflict to end their fighting and unite in a new harmony of peace, as the refrain of each stanza intimates. But as the fighting spread, Yeats and his family felt walled in by the uncertainty of violence: “We are closed in, and the key is turned / On our uncertainty.” They heard of “A man killed, or a house burned, / Yet no clear fact to be discerned.” In stanza 3, two particularly lines are startling:

Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:

Yeats’s final stanza articulates what drove the Irish to brutally turn on each other over political disagreement:

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; oh, honey-bees
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Just as in Yeats’s Ireland at the time of its separation from Britain, America has two intensively polarized political parties. Tragically, both Irish parties resorted to horrific violence as they pursued their political aims. In America today, only one of the parties is directing a government agency to use violence against American citizens. It is doing so in its attempt to realize a fantasy about purifying America of “undesirable immigrants.” Killing Goode and Pretti should demonstrate to anyone how far Trump will go and how willingly he will use violence to achieve his (and Miller’s) objective.  

Achilles' Shield

Homer’s world of the Iliad glorifies war and heroism. In that world, Thetis, mother of Achilles, asks Hephaestus, Greek god of blacksmiths, artisans, and metallurgy to forge a shield for her son Achilles, the greatest Greek hero of the Trojan War. On this magnificent shield, Hephaestus emblazoned a microcosm of the Greek world using all the fine metals: gold, silver, copper, tin. The shield depicts a microcosm of the world, and life in ancient Greece and represents the grandeur of war and the serenity of peace.

Since Trump has entered the White House, he has emblazoned the residence with gold appliqués, gold inscriptions, and gold ornaments to transform the residence into his “gilded age of greatness.” What can all this gold signify? It is Trump’s shield, his projection and affirmation of his heroic grandeur. (Trump’s “gold shield” has been forged by his “gold guy” from Florida rather than a Greek god.) This gaudy gilt is a manifestation of Trump’s self-glorification. As Thomas B. Edsail documents in his New York Times essay, Trump is a “malignant” narcissist who possesses “little external capacity for self-soothing or self-valuation” and requires “continuous external affirmations to feel real and intact.”

That Trump needs to see gold everywhere to verify his worth is one symptom of his narcissism. His need to dominate universities, law firms, and other nations is another, much more disturbing manifestation of his narcissistic personality disorder. Recently he has threatened to take Greenland by force, and since Greenland has extensive self-rule over domestic matters and Denmark handles its defense and foreign policy, Trump has threatened to use tariffs as weapons against European countries if they do not accept his demands to buy that vast island. Greenland, where U.S. troops have always been welcome, definitively stated they do not want to be part of the United States. They clearly prefer Denmark to the U.S. Trump claims to be motivated by national security concerns, but it is his fantasy to see his name in future history books as the president who acquired the largest territory ever to become part of the U.S. For him, this is another attempt at self-aggrandizement and would elevate him in glory above all previous and future presidents. This move against Greenland threatens to undermine NATO, not only vexing, but also placing member nations in jeopardy after 76 years of cooperation.

With Greenland fearing an American invasion, with ICE troops terrorizing the people of Minneapolis, and with regular army troops mobilizing to deploy there, the predictions that Trump would become a tyrant if elected now seem disturbingly prescient.

The poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973) saw the effect 20th century tyrants and world wars had on humanity. In his poem, “The Shield of Achilles,” Auden’s reworks Homer’s idealized art into terrifying visions of political totalitarianism and social depravity:

    
The Shield of Achilles

    She looked over his shoulder
       For vines and olive trees,
    Marble well-governed cities
       And ships upon untamed seas,
    But there on the shining metal
       His hands had put instead
    An artificial wilderness
       And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
   No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
   Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
   An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
   Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
   No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
   Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

    She looked over his shoulder
       For ritual pieties,
    White flower-garlanded heifers,
       Libation and sacrifice,
    But there on the shining metal
       Where the altar should have been,
    She saw by his flickering forge-light
       Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
   Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
   A crowd of ordinary decent folk
   Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
   That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
   And could not hope for help and no help came:
   What their foes liked to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

    She looked over his shoulder
       For athletes at their games,
    Men and women in a dance
       Moving their sweet limbs
    Quick, quick, to music,
       But there on the shining shield
    His hands had set no dancing-floor
       But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
   Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
   That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
   Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

    The thin-lipped armorer,
       Hephaestus, hobbled away,
    Thetis of the shining breasts
       Cried out in dismay
    At what the god had wrought
       To please her son, the strong
    Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
       Who would not live long.

Auden’s poem lays out a structure of apparent contrast between the ancient Greek and modern worlds. The contrast between these two worlds reflects what Thetis expects Hephaestus to create, and what actually appears on the shield. Looking over Hephaestus’ shoulder in stanza 1, Thetis anticipates bucolic images of life and orderly communities: “She looked over his shoulder / for vines and olive trees, / Marble well-governed cities” and instead sees “An artificial wilderness / And a sky like lead.” In stanza 2, this lifeless, colorless picture evolves further into “A plain without a feature, bare, and brown,” where “An unintelligible multitude” of “A million eyes, a million boots” (of soldiers) await their orders. Those orders come in stanza 3 when a faceless voice directs the soldiers to march mindlessly toward the suffering and death they are ordered to inflict. The “logic” legitimizing their orders is supported by “statistics” and therefore the soldiers obey their orders without questioning the rationale to attack others. (Reminds one of Mark Kelly, etc., reminding military men and women to be alert to illegal military orders in contrast to following orders blindly.)

In stanza 4, Thetis searches the emerging shield for images of religious ceremonies of “ritual pieties / White flower-garlanded heifers / Libations and sacrifice,” but Hephaestus has etched “Quite another scene.” That scene, depicted in stanza 5, is a prison camp enclosed with “Barbed wire” detaining three prisoners, while a “crowd of ordinary decent folk / Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke.” Auden’s irony is unmistakable and the religious images of “three posts driven upright in the ground,” followed by the details of stanza 6, tell the reader that an incredibly cruel execution about to take place is simply the murder of innocent men.

In stanza 7, Thetis looks one last time over Hephaestus’ shoulder, expecting to see scenes of great athletic competition and men and women sweetly dancing to music, only to view a “weed-choked field” in which a “ragged urchin” wanders without purpose and cruelly throws a stone at frightened bird. At this point in the poem, Hephaestus’ artistic impetus for crafting these scenes on Achilles’ shield becomes clear. Human cruelty and violence are endemic to human nature and are “axioms to him, (Hephaestus) who never heard / Of any world where promises were kept, / Or one could weep because another wept.”

Auden’s poem might seem an extreme exaggeration in comparison to America under Trump, but poetry can reveal painful truths more powerfully than prose. In the poem, poor Thetis looks “over [Hephaestus’] shoulder” as he constructs a new shield. She anticipates “ritual pieties,” but image after image display the brutal reality Auden’s witnessed in the modern world, during and after World War II. The last stanza contains words that could be uttered by many in Minneapolis:

Thetis of the shining breasts
       Cried out in dismay
    At what the god had wrought.

Another (Shelley) Poem for the New Year

Instead of renewed hope, January has brought us a resurgence of “American imperialism and a vision for a new world order in which the United States could freely overthrow national governments and take foreign territory and resources so long as it was in the national interest.” (Chris Cameron, “Stephen Miller Asserts U.S. Has Right to Take Greenland,” New York Times). It has the military force to do so, and no one should doubt that Greenland is soon to fall under its control. As Stephen Miller pronounced, this is the central tenet of the Trump administration’s foreign policy philosophy: “We live in a world, in the real world...that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

In the 19th century, stronger nations subjugated smaller ones simply because they could. Two centuries later, many of us would like to believe that humanity has progressed and has mostly outgrown its old barbarous appetite for conquest. In fact, Steven Pinker argues that, in general, violence has decreased and the world is in its most peaceful period in human history. Statistically, Pinker is accurate. Yet, the world’s largest militaries led by three ravening leaders, Trump, Putin, and Xi, seek to devour smaller political entities.

Domestically, Trump has chosen to enforce his immigration policy with an iron fist rather than employ reasonable means to determine the status of immigrants. Those accused of being here without proper documentation are denied their due process rights guaranteed by our Constitution. Rather, Trump has invoked The Alien Enemies Act, to aggressively hunt down those suspected of being here “illegally.” With hope fading each day, we could use a prophetic voice to remind us that the struggle for peace, kindness and love is eternal and forever worth fighting for.

Percy Shelley (1792-1822) believed, as many of us do today, that all countries have the right to freedom and self-determination. In 1821, he wrote a poem, “The World’s Great Age,” spoken by a chorus of Greek women slaves to conclude his verse drama, Hellas. The play was conceived and written by Shelley to express his support for Greece in its war of independence against the Ottoman Turks, but the poem also suggests Shelley’s vision of a new age in which human beings no longer wage war to dominate one another. Through the chorus of Greek women, Shelley foresees a new “golden age” akin to that of classical Greece. In this poem, the future promises peace, love and joy.

            The World's Great Age

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 later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
  And loves, and weeps, and dies;
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.

O, 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, that One who rose,
  Than many unsubdued;
Not gold, not blood their altar dowers
But votive tears and symbol flowers.

O 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,
O, might it die or rest at last!

Shelley’s poem is lyrically superb, but his classical allusions need some annotation to arrest the confusion with which they can confound the reader. The first stanza contains an allusion to the mythical reign of Saturn in the words “The golden years return.” In Greek mythology, Saturn’s reign signifies the golden age, a period of peace, abundance, wealth and ease for the human race. As Shelley imagines the return of this “age,” he also sees the earth shedding its old clothes, “winter weeds,” and predicts that the morally obsolete and corrupt “faiths,” and “empires” “dissolving” like a “dream” will vanish.

In stanza 2, a peaceful, sunny setting welcomes the river god Peneus flowing at dawn through the vale of Tempe. The old-world fades, as a new reality emerges, and the ideal of ancient Greece (Hellas) rises in its place. New iterations of the classical heroes, Jason (“loftier Argo”), Ulysses, and the archetypal poet Orpheus appear.

Shelley anticipates a new world order resurrecting the sublime ideal of classical Greece. But he also recognizes that the culture of Greece had its share of greed, violence, and tyranny. In Stanza 3, Shelley urges the present to “write no more the tale of Troy, or the evil that befouled Oedipus and Thebes. Instead, Shelley calls for a revised version of that ancient glory. “Another Athens” to “arise,” an “idealized” ideal of the past.

Shelley looks to that mythical epoch of the Golden Age to resurrect “Saturn and Love” and replace all the world’s other deities. But can this ancient myth inaugurate the transformation of humanity Shelley desires? His final stanza suggests his poetic labors might be in vain:

O 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,
O! might it die or rest at last!

In one way, we live in an age not so different from Shelley’s: the menace the powerful leaders pose is ominous. No new golden age can be seen approaching, despite the absurd assertions of the Make America Great politician, but we hold the belief that our country, like Athens, “shall arise,” eventually rid itself of “bitter prophecy,” and of “hate,” we can finally “grow weary of the past” and choose to “rise…like sunset to the skies.”

New Year Poems and Thoughts

 As January rolls around, we want to look ahead to a promising new year. Unfortunately, daily news depresses optimism and dissuades hope.

It steadily sinks the spirit: the immigration policy that detains and deports many immigrants who are simply seeking better lives for themselves; we have a president who brags about this inhumane policy to cheering Maga crowds; there is the pay for play funding scheme to build a garish, ballroom; the new presidential plaques lining the White House wall exalting Trump while vilifying three former presidents whose reputations continue to threaten his childish ego.

Of course, there are the illegal Drone strikes in the Caribbean and the Epstein files cover up.

With all this, and so much more, multitudes still not only support this president, but also worship this appalling narcissist. Why? Why do so many fail to be revolted by his daily mendacity? Why are so many indifferent to the callous cruelty and the conspicuous cupidity of this administration? Perhaps a few poems by Samuel Johnson, William Wordsworth, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden will give us a little insight into why.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) is one of the great giants of English literature, was a keen analyst of human nature and a brilliant judge of literature. Having written essays, literary biographyies, poetry, a play, even the first dictionary of the English language, he clearly understood why humans chase their delusive desires, even when common sense thunders the foolishness of their choices. In The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal, Imitated, and its effects. Accordingly, his Dictionary defines vanity as “uncertainty,” “fruitless desire,” and “falsehood,”

The poem’s first twenty-eight lines illustrate how the pursuit and realization of wishes, i.e., dreams of political power, financial success, intellectual achievement, and physical beauty, are futile and never bring true or lasting happiness.

The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire
of Juvenal, Imitated

Let observation with extensive view,
Survey mankind, from China to Peru;
Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife,
And watch the busy scenes of crowded life;
Then say how hope and fear, desire and hate,              5
O’erspread with snares the clouded maze of fate,
Where wav’ring man, betray’d by vent’rous pride
To tread the dreary paths without a guide,
As treach’rous phantoms in the mist delude,
Shuns fancied ills, or chases airy good.                          10
How rarely reason guides the stubborn choice,
Rules the bold hand, or prompts the suppliant voice,
How nations sink, by darling schemes oppress’d,
When vengeance listens to the fool’s request.
Fate wings with ev’ry wish th’ afflictive dart,                15
Each gift of nature, and each grace of art,
With fatal heat impetuous courage glows,
With fatal sweetness elocution flows,
Impeachment stops the speaker’s pow’rful breath,
And restless fire precipitates on death.                           20

But scarce observ’d the knowing and the bold,
Fall in the gen’ral massacre of gold;
Wide-wasting pest! that rages unconfin’d,
And crowds with crimes the records of mankind,
For gold his sword the hireling ruffian draws,               25
For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws;
Wealth heap’d on wealth, nor truth nor safety buys,
The dangers gather as the treasures rise.

Johnson establishes straight away his intention. In stanza 1, he tells the readers to open their eyes to see “how hope and fear, desire and hate / Ov’erspread with snares the clouded maze of fate” and “pride,” that architect of high-flown ideas, misleads “wav’ring man” as he pursues “fancied ills, or airy good.” Reason “rarely…guides” decision making, “[r]ules” or “prompts” what men do or say. “[N]ations” are oppressed by the “darling” (favorite) schemes” of their leaders who seek vengeance against perceived enemies. In stanza 2, the speaker observes that the lust for money corrupts even men who should be above reproach: that men “But scarce observe, the knowing and the bold / Fall in the ger’ral massacre of gold.” The desire for gold induces the “ruffian” to rob his victims and the “judge” to distort the “laws.”

Johnson continues his survey to observe and display a world dominated by ambition, cruelty, treachery, pride, arrogance, greed, and, of course, vanity. He develops five categories of the types of wishes that drive men and women: political power (lines 73-134), intellectual achievement (lines 135-174), military glory (lines 175-254), longevity (lines 255-318), and physical beauty (lines 319-344). In lines 345-368, Johnson argues that only Christian humility and prayer can rescue the weak human mind and concludes with the thought that “celestial Wisdom calms the Mind, / And makes the Happiness she does not find.” Here is a link to the full poem.

Perhaps Johnson’s poem overwhelms the reader with its variety of human wishes that delude men and women into pursuing irrational desires. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) simplifies Johnson’s critique of humanity with his sonnet “The World is Too Much with Us.” In it, Wordsworth censures the growing materialism in England in the early eighteenth century.

          The World Is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

In this simple sonnet, Wordsworth exhorts his readers to recognize how their lives are wasted by their obsession with material goods, their “Getting and spending.” Instead of giving in to materialism, that “sordid boon” they value most of all, his readers must take note of the “Sea that bares her bosom to the moon” and “The winds that will be howling at all hours.” Unfortunately, they “are out of tune” with nature and unmoved by its sublime beauty and power. Like Johnson, Wordsworth is repelled by human behavior, specifically the materialism that consumes men and women. Whereas Johnson sees prayer as a means to heal the fallen human soul, Wordsworth reckons no words will rescue society from the power of materialism. Instead, he chooses to imagine himself transported to ancient days where he might see “Proteus rising from the sea; / Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.”

In the lines (1-4) denouncing materialism and loss of spirituality, Wordsworth implies also a rebuke of social conformity. The collective pronouns “us” and “we” coupled with the phrases “The world is too much with,” and “Getting and spending” amalgamate all English citizens as a uniform mass of materialistic beings. This conformity dehumanized, in Wordsworth’s eyes, his fellow countrymen and women. A little more than a hundred years later, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) saw another kind of conformity, equally contemptible but certainly more destructive.

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             The Leaders of the Crowd

They must to keep their certainty accuse
All that are different of a base intent;
Pull down established honour; hawk for news
Whatever their loose fantasy invent
And murmur it with bated breath, as though
The abounding gutter had been Helicon
Or calumny a song.  How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student's lamp has shone,
And there alone, that have no solitude?
So the crowd come they care not what may come.
They have loud music, hope every day renewed
And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.

At the start of this post, I asked why so many support Trump. In Yeats’s poem we find a partial answer. A political leader can be adept at persuading his followers with facile slogans and scurrilous claims about political opponents. Trump has utilized both means to convince millions to support him. Like the “Leaders” in Yeats’s poem, he accuses all who disagree with him of “base intent.” He attempts to create (“hawk”) the “news” through lies and outrageous claims and has been successful at dominating the news’s cycle with his ceaseless bluster. Yeats believed that “Truth flourish[ed] where the student’s lamp has shone,” and maybe he was right. But does such truth have the capacity to shine bright enough to illuminate the minds of the “crowd” swayed by the “loud music" or as Trump has managed to do: “with calumnious art / Of counterfeited truth thus held their ears.” (PL, V 770-771) The poem’s last 6 words leave us uncertain. Are those words spoken by Yeats or do they come from the leaders? If from the leaders, then they are mocking the speaker’s claim, but not necessarily diminishing its truth. If they are the poet’s belief, then Yeats is saying that truth and honor can only exist in solitude or does truth always perish in the loud music of the crowd. I leave it to the reader to decide which interpretation is right.

Two Sonnets

One of the most interesting types of poetry to flourish in the time of Shakespeare (1564-1616) was the sonnet sequence. A number of poets wrote sonnets, and three who composed the best sonnet sequences of that period are Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), Edmund Spenser (1552-1599), and Shakespeare. These poets inherited the sonnet form from early English poets who in turn adapted the form from the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch (1307-1374). Petrarch was born in Arzezzo, Italy. He initially studied law but chose to become instead a minor ecclesiastic official (a cleric) in the church against his father’s wishes. Together, father and son moved to France and in 1327 he saw Laura de Noves while at mass in Avignon and shortly after began composing sonnets telling of his love for her and his devotion to her. Later, Laura died in the plague of 1348, but Petrarch persisted in his adoration of her until his own death. In all, he wrote 317 sonnets in his sequence. All of these profoundly talented poets explore the subject of love in their sonnets but only Spenser celebrates love as a bliss that is consummated in the happy union (of marriage) between the man and the woman.

An early translation of one of Petrarch’s sonnets is by Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542). It is a dramatic rendition of a timid and intimidated man by an unyielding woman:

   The Long Love that in my Thought doth Harbour

                          

The long love that in my thought doth harbour
And in mine heart doth keep his residence
Into my face preseth with bold pretence
And therein campeth, spreading his banner.
She that me learneth to love and suffer
And will that my trust and lust's negligence
Be reigned by reason, shame, and reverence
With his hardiness taketh displeasure.
Wherewithall unto the heart's forest he fleeth,
Leaving his enterprise with pain and cry,
And there him hideth and not appeareth.
What may I do when master feareth
But in the field with him to live and die?
For good is the life ending faithfully.

The speaker in the sonnet dramatizes the conflict between his desire for the woman he loves and her angry response to his display of passion. With sudden military-like force his passion spreads across his face, revealing for all to see the irrepressible love he feels. Until this embarrassing moment, he seems to have managed to suppress that emotion, clearly surrendering to the ‘command’ she “taught” him about expressing his feelings. Her rebuke instills him with fear and sends him and his “love” retreating into the thickets of his “heart’s forest.” There it will set up camp, but no doubt love will escape again and provoke the ire of the woman who scorns the man she completely subjugates.

Like Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney understood the anguish of unrequited love. He fell in love with Penelope Devereux (1563-1607), but she married another man. The experience inspired his sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella. Through the 108 sonnets, Astrophel paints a meditative, self-exploration of his love for Stella that is psychologically complex and also playfully amusing. In the first sonnet of the sequence Sidney introduces the theme of finding the inspiration to write poetry.

                  Sonnet 1

Loving in truth and fain in verse my love to show,
That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe;
Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburn'd brain.
but words came halting forth, wanting invention's stay;
Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows;
And others' feet still seem'd but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
'Fool,' said my Muse to me, 'look in thy heart, and write.'

The first line of the sonnet tells the reader two important ideas. First, Astrophel’s love for Stella is genuine and unaffected, “Loving in truth,” and second, Astrophel intends to impart his love through poetry, “and fain in verse my love to show.” Admirable as it is to write love poems to the woman he desires, Astrophel’s means of accomplishing his aim is flawed, even though he perceives a logic to his method. When Stella reads this first sonnet, she might be pleased, which might make her want to read more of his poems. As she does, she will come to know his “pain,” giving her “knowledge” which “might” cause her “pity” and that pity for Astrophel might conceivably her “grace obtain.” After lines 1-4, Astrophel could be on his way to capturing Stella’s love, but in fact, he is only moving himself further from accomplishing his goal. Line 5 produces the crux of his effort, “I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,” but also reveals the flaw in his method. The verb to “paint” perhaps betrays something inauthentic in Astrophel’s manner of composition, something superficial in the way he is attempting to communicate his love. Lines 6-12 reveal an obstacle Astrophel mistook for a way to find those “fit words” to express himself. He searches other poets and poems for suitable “inventions fine” to “entertain” Stella with and discovers that plagiarizing other poets cannot engender poetic creation. In fact, searching for the right words from “others’ leaves” only leave him interminably pregnant, unable to give birth to poem(s) that persuade her to love him too. 

Wordsworth's "Intimation Ode"

  Of all the poetry William Wordsworth (1770-1850) wrote, three stand among the greatest of the 19th century: Tintern Abbey; Ode; Intimations of Immortality; and The Prelude. His Ode has garnered praise and admiration and might even be viewed as his crowning masterpiece. It is a beautiful and fascinating poem that contemplates what is lost as we “mature” from children to adults. Written in irregular Pindaric ode, it takes the reader through eleven stanzas of 204 lines. I have included a link to Michael Sheen’s fine reading of the poem for anyone who wants to also hear the poem read aloud. (If possible, view the poem in desktop mode to see an accurate shape of the text.)

Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood

          The Child is father of the Man;
          And I could wish my days to be
          Bound each to each by natural piety.

                                        1
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight
                 To me did seem
            Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
             Turn wheresoe’er I may,
              By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

                                        2
            The rainbow comes and goes,
            And lovely is the rose;
            The moon doth with delight
     Look round her when the heavens are bare;
            Waters on a starry night
            Are beautiful and fair;
     The sunshine is a glorious birth;
     But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

                                        3
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
     And while the young lambs bound
            As to the tabor’s sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
            And I again am strong.
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep,—
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong:
I hear the echoes through the mountains throng.
The winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
            And all the earth is gay;
                Land and sea
     Give themselves up to jollity,
            And with the heart of May
     Doth every beast keep holiday;—
                Thou child of joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy
        Shepherd-boy!

                                        4
                 Ye blesséd Creatures, I have heard the call 
     Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
     My heart is at your festival,
       My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.
         O evil day! if I were sullen
         While Earth herself is adorning
              This sweet May-morning;
         And the children are culling
              On every side
         In a thousand valleys far and wide
         Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the babe leaps up on his mother’s arm:—
         I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
         —But there’s a tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have look’d upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
              The pansy at my feet
              Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

                                        5
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
          Hath had elsewhere its setting
               And cometh from afar;
          Not in entire forgetfulness,
          And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
               From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
               Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
               He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
     Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,
          And by the vision splendid
          Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

                                        6
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a mother’s mind,
               And no unworthy aim,
          The homely nurse doth all she can
To make her foster-child, her inmate, Man,
               Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.

                                        7
Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years’ darling of a pigmy size!
See, where ’mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother’s kisses,
With light upon him from his father’s eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art;
          A wedding or a festival,
          A mourning or a funeral;
               And this hath now his heart,
          And unto this he frames his song:
               Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
          But it will not be long
          Ere this be thrown aside,
          And with new joy and pride
The little actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his ‘humorous stage’
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That life brings with her in her equipage;
          As if his whole vocation
          Were endless imitation.

                                        8
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
          Thy soul’s immensity;
Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal Mind,—
          Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
          On whom those truths rest
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the day, a master o’er a slave,
A Presence which is not to be put by;
          To whom the grave
Is but a lonely bed, without the sense of sight
Of day or the warm light,
A place of thoughts where we in waiting lie;
Thou little child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being’s height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

                                        9
          O joy! that in our embers
          Is something that doth live,
          That Nature yet remembers
          What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest,
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:—
          —Not for these I raise
          The song of thanks and praise;
     But for those obstinate questionings
     Of sense and outward things,
     Fallings from us, vanishings,
     Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized, 
High instincts, before which our mortal nature 
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
     But for those first affections,
     Those shadowy recollections,
          Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
     Uphold us—cherish—and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
               To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
               Nor man nor boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
   Hence, in a season of calm weather
          Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
               Which brought us hither;
          Can in a moment travel thither—
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

                                        10
Then, sing, ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
          And let the young lambs bound
          As to the tabor’s sound!
     We, in thought, will join your throng,
          Ye that pipe and ye that play,
          Ye that through your hearts to-day
          Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
     Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
          We will grieve not, rather find
          Strength in what remains behind;
          In the primal sympathy
          Which having been must ever be;
          In the soothing thoughts that spring
          Out of human suffering;
          In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

                                        11          
And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquish’d one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway;
I love the brooks which down their channels fret
Even more than when I tripp’d lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born day
               Is lovely yet;
The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
   Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
   Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
   To me the meanest flower that blows can give
   Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

By separating the Ode into three movements, one can interpreted it as an elegy about loss, despair and resurrected hope. The first part consists of stanza 1-4, the second of 5-8 and the third of 9-11. The initial stanza makes clear that Wordsworth is feeling a profound sense of loss. He looks around him, sees the world of nature but can no longer see the “celestial light” and “the glory and the freshness of a dream” that once was permeated that world. It is not that nature has lost its beauty. “The Rainbow,” “the Rose,” “The Moon,” the “Waters,” are still beautiful. But for him “there hath past away a glory from the earth.” The words, “past away” suggest death, and within his mind Wordsworth is suffering a kind of death: a spiritual one. In stanza 4, he regrets being “sullen / While Earth herself is adorning, / This sweet May-morning…” Nevertheless, he cannot shake the sadness that is gripping him, the mournful feeling of loss overcoming him. He laments his inability to now possess “the visionary gleam” and “the glory and the dream” that he once had.

The second movement of the poem, stanza 5-8, Wordsworth recounts the origin and evolution of his despair. He purports in stanza 5 that the soul pre-exists with God and “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” We emerge from the womb “trailing clouds of glory” and “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” This metaphysical connection cannot be sustained in the physical world and the “Youth” who possesses the “vision splendid” grows into “the Man [who] perceives it die away.” In stanza 6, Mother “Earth” sees the despair that arises from the deprivation of this heavenly gift and does what she can to assuage that grief by helping him “Forget the glories he hath known, / And that imperial palace whence he came.” Wordsworth next imagines the young child playing games imitating adult life. This imitation only removes the child further from his unity with his heavenly origins and in stanza 8 Wordsworth asks the child, whom he now calls the “best philosopher” and “Mighty Prophet,” “Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke / The years to bring the inevitable yoke.”

Just when all seems lost, the third movement (stanzas 9-11) of the poem answers the question raised in stanza 8. Stanzas 9 and 10 reveals how the diminished man, Through the faculty of memory Wordsworth realizes he can regain a sense of the divine, those “trailing clouds of glory” that become shrouded in the “Shades of the prison-house” and “At length… / fade into the light of common day” as the young child grows into an adult. He begins stanza 9 with “O joy! that in our embers / Is something that doth live, / That nature yet remembers / What was so fugitive!” And that “something” is the divine essence possess at birth and lost as he moved toward adult life. He discovers those “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” in “The thought (memory) of his past years [that] in me doth breed / Perpetual benediction” which “Are yet the fountain light of all our day, / Are yet a master light of all our seeing.” Though he is far from his childhood and has lost the “visionary gleam” and “the power of the dream” the child still possessed, Wordsworth can attain “truths that wake,” and “… / Can in a moment travel thither, / And see the Children sport upon the shore, / And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.” The fulfillment of hope lies in what he remembers.

This discovery of hope “leaps up” in stanzas 10 and 11. However, it is a hope quite difference from the unbounded joy he felt as a child. He hears the birds “sing a joyous song! and accepts he has lost “the radiance which was once so bright” he believes there is compensation that the philosophic mind can offer:

Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffer;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

He accepts that “nothing can bring back” the special, divine connection with nature the child experiences. Instead, Wordsworth finds a “Strength,” which he calls a “primal sympathy.” This instinctual sympathy for human beings in general and human suffering in particular replaces “the vision splendid,” which is that instinct of seeing and knowing the divine in nature when the child feels immortal. The final eight lines close the poem with a sense of transformation. The original despair over the loss of childhood insight becomes the adult insight, an ability to see what is lost as we age and to feel the profound sympathy for the inevitable human condition.  

The Duality of Robert Frost

In 1959 the publishers Holt, Rinehart and Winston hosted a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan celebrating Robert Frost’s 85th birthday. At the time, Frost was easily America’s most popular poet, and many readers considered him to be a poet of charming poems that danced rhythmically along in gracefully rhyming lines. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” illustrates this view and is one his poems that most young students would have memorized and recited for their English classes.

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          Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells aa shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep, 
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

No one would deny the mellifluous quality of these lines. The poem has a compelling musical rhythm (meter) that makes it easy to memorize. Its images are physically soothing and visually serene: “The only other sound’s the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake.” The little speech to his horse is playfully quaint and even amusing. The speaker’s act of “…stopping here / To watch his woods fill up with snow” then resuming his journey to fulfill those “promises,” can be interpreted as a brief respite during which he feels a beautiful tranquility. Perhaps he is even having a transcendent moment, something like Wordsworth’s experiences in his poems about nature. But some readers sense something darker in the poem, that the speaker is instead being pulled into an unknown, into an oblivion that will erase his existence. Afterall, he finds himself isolated from humanity and has interrupted his progress enough to confound his horse’s sense of how they should be proceeding. Though “The woods are lovely,” they are also “dark and deep” and extend beyond human perception and comprehension. They stretch into an unknown and pose what some readers saw as a dark terror that they also found in other poems by Frost. The Columbia English professor, critic and scholar, Lionel Trilling, when he spoke at Frost’s 85th birthday dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria, commented on this element in Frost’s poetry. He said: “I think of Robert Frost as a terrifying poet. Call him, if it makes things easier, a tragic poet, but it might be useful every now and then to step out from under the shelter of that literary word. The universe he conceives is a terrifying universe…Read the poem called “Design” and see if you sleep the better for it. Read Neither Out Far nor In Deep, which seems to me the most perfect poem of our time, and see if you are warmed by anything in it except the energy with which emptiness is perceived.” Trilling’s remarks stunned the audience attending the party, provoked letters of protest to the New York Times book critic J. Donald Adams and surprised but did not upset Frost. Reading “Design” confirms Trilling assertion:

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                    Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-heal?
What had brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.

This poem, which is a Petrarchan sonnet, has two parts, the octave (8 lines) and the sestet (6 lines). In the octave, the speaker describes an incident in which he comes upon the “white heal-all” flower and finds a spider holding in its grasp a dead moth. The speaker’s first response to what he sees can appear almost like a children’s story (Charlotte’s Web), with its “dimpled spider” a white flower, and a moth imagined as white “satin cloth.” Any such impression is obliterated with unequivocal force by line 4: “Assorted characters of death and blight.” The matter-of-fact wording leaves no doubt about the violence of the scene. In the next four lines (5-8), the speaker links the noun, “characters,” of the previous line to the verb phrase “Mixed ready to begin the morning right.” Why does he say, “begin the morning right”? What could be right about this image of insect carnage, of the dead moth wings as a “paper kite”?

The sestet proposes an answer through a series of questions. The speaker asks why the flower is white, what brought the spider to that flower and finally what “steered” the moth to that flower. Is what the speaker sees something governed by a malign supernatural power who orchestrates appalling violence or is it simply another indifferent process of nature’s cycle of life and death?

“Design” can convince a reader that Frost believed the universe was truly a place that inspired the terror in Frost’s poetry that Lionel Trilling spoke of in his speech at Frost’s 85th birthday. The world is an alien, hostile place where predators wait to ambush prey. Another poem flexing this point of view is “Stars”:

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                   Stars

How countlessly they congregate
  O'er our tumultuous snow,
Which flows in shapes as tall as tree
  When wintry winds do blow!--

As if with keenness for our fate,
  Our faltering few steps on 
To white rest, and a place of rest
  Invisible at dawn,--

And yet with neither love nor hate,
  Those stars like some snow-white
Minerva's snow-white marble eyes
  Without the gift of sight.

The poem begins on a winter’s night, with snow blown deep and tall, while above the speaker stars “congregate” as if intentionally gathering for some purpose. The second stanza suggests why the speaker feels the stars are shining down on us: “As if with keenness for our fate,” as if to light his way till the dawn arrives. This guiding light of supernatural power is snatched away by the third stanza which concludes the poem and abandons human beings in an indifferent universe. The stars have no more interest in humanity than a cold, white statue of the Roman goddess wisdom, Minerva whose blind eyes shed only more darkness.

No great poet is simply one sided and Frost is no exception. His poetry also reveals the influence of the romantic poets Wordsworth, Keats, and Emerson and the creative intimations of mystic vision. An early poem by Frost illustrating this vision is “Going for Water.”

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      Going for Water

The well was dry beside the door,
  And so we went with pail and can
Across the fields behind the house
  To seek the brook if still it ran;

Not loth to have excuse to go,
  Because the autumn eve was fair
(Though chill), because the fields were ours,
  And by the brook our woods were there.

We ran as if to meet the moon
  That slowly dawned behind the trees,
The barren boughs without the leaves,
  Without the birds, without the breeze.

But once within the wood, we paused
  Like gnomes that hid us from the moon,
Ready to run to hiding new
  With laughter when she found us soon.

Each laid on other a staying hand
  To listen ere we dared to look,
And in the hush we joined to make
  We heard, we knew we heard the brook.

A note as from a single place,
  A slender tinkling fall that made
Now drops that floated on the pool
  Like peals, and now a silver blade.

In the first two stanzas, the speaker and his companion notice their water well is dry and head out with a can and pail to collect water from a nearby brook. After this literal, though rhyming, description, the next four stanzas become an adventure, a journey metaphorical and spiritual. In stanza 3, the young pair enter the woods running “as if to meet the moon” through denuded and bird barren trees. In their innocence they imagine they are gnomes hiding from the moon. They join hands, listen and in a hush hear the brook. In the last stanza, a transcendent moment descends upon the children: they hear a “note,” and see drops that floated on the pool / Like pearls, and now a silver blade.” The chore of fetching water becomes a mystic visionary experience absorbed through the vehicle of nature.

Reading Robert Frost’s poetry sometimes inclines us toward the visionary experience such as we find in the poems of William Wordsworth or Ralph Waldo Emerson. Other times, Frost finds himself immersed within an indifferent universe and his verse reflects his bleak interpretation. This fascinating duality informs so much of his work that the reader can be at a loss to pin down where Frost stands philosophically. And it’s that ambiguity, along with his extraordinary lyricism that make his poems always compelling.