"Needless Death After All"

 After Alex Pretti was murdered by CBP agents, Kristy Noem and Stephen Miller immediately slandered him. Noem said Pretti was a “domestic terrorist,” and Miller labeled him a “would be assassin.” Video evidence refuted those lies and families and friends of Good and Pretti told the truth about who these two really were. According to those who knew Good best, she was “extremely compassionate,” “loving,” “forgiving,” and “affectionate.” Pretti’s coworkers, friends and family spoke of him as a “role model,” “diligent and respectful,” “kind,” and “a good man.” When the history of Trump’s administration is written, they should be acknowledged prominently along with a cadre of individuals who have lost jobs/professions (the list is far too extensive to itemize) as casualties of a malevolent presidency.

Trump himself fantasies about how history will remember him. He imagines being glorified as a great leader: a man whose effect on human events will astound future audiences; a man whom poets elegize for the wonders he has achieved. In truth, historians who chronicle his two terms will paint a grim and disturbing portrait of a man mastered by greed, envy, spite and narcissism. Poets will only write elegies that will drip with a caustic ridicule of his poisonous personality. Of course, Maga devotees such as Mark Levin will forever ooze with sycophantic adulation for him.

The elegy, a form of poetry that dates back to Greek and Roman poetry, and has been used to express love, loss or mourning, among other subjects. In 16th century English literature, the elegy became more strictly a poem of lament for the death of someone. The most famous elegy (or it used to be) is Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1750). Shortly after World War I, William Butler Yeats wrote his finest elegy, lamenting the death of Robert Gregory, who was killed while flying in Italy during the war:

In Memory of Major Robert Gregory

I

Now that we're almost settled in our house
I'll name the friends that cannot sup with us
Beside a fire of turf in th' ancient tower,
And having talked to some late hour
Climb up the narrow winding stair to bed:
Discoverers of forgotten truth
Or mere companions of my youth,
All, all are in my thoughts to-night being dead.

II

Always we'd have the new friend meet the old
And we are hurt if either friend seem cold,
And there is salt to lengthen out the smart
In the affections of our heart,
And quarrels are blown up upon that head;
But not a friend that I would bring
This night can set us quarrelling,
For all that come into my mind are dead.

III

Lionel Johnson comes the first to mind,
That loved his learning better than mankind.
Though courteous to the worst; much falling he
Brooded upon sanctity
Till all his Greek and Latin learning seemed
A long blast upon the horn that brought
A little nearer to his thought
A measureless consummation that he dreamed.

IV

And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,
That dying chose the living world for text
And never could have rested in the tomb
But that, long travelling, he had come
Towards nightfall upon certain set apart
In a most desolate stony place,
Towards nightfall upon a race
passionate and simple like his heart.

V

And then I think of old George Pollexfen,
In muscular youth well known to Mayo men
For horsemanship at meets or at racecourses,
That could have shown how pure-bred horses
And solid men, for all their passion, live
But as the outrageous stars incline
By opposition, square and trine;
Having grown sluggish and contemplative.

VI

They were my close companions many a year.
A portion of my mind and life, as it were,
And now their breathless faces seem to look
Out of some old picture-book;
I am accustomed to their lack of breath,
But not that my dear friend's dear son,
Our Sidney and our perfect man,
Could share in that discourtesy of death

VII

For all things the delighted eye now sees
Were loved by him: the old storm-broken trees
That cast their shadows upon road and bridge;
The tower set on the stream's edge;
The ford where drinking cattle make a stir
Nightly, and startled by that sound
The water-hen must change her ground;
He might have been your heartiest welcomer.

VIII

When with the Galway foxhounds he would ride
From Castle Taylor to the Roxborough side
Or Esserkelly plain, few kept his pace;
At Mooneen he had leaped a place
So perilous that half the astonished meet
Had shut their eyes; and where was it
He rode a race without a bit?
And yet his mind outran the horses' feet.

IX

We dreamed that a great painter had been born
To cold Clare rock and Galway rock and thorn,
To that stern colour and that delicate line
That are our secret discipline
Wherein the gazing heart doubles her might.
Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,
And yet he had the intensity
To have published all to be a world's delight.

X

What other could so well have counselled us
In all lovely intricacies of a house
As he that practised or that understood
All work in metal or in wood,
In moulded plaster or in carven stone?
Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,
And all he did done perfectly
As though he had but that one trade alone.

XI

Some burn dam faggots, others may consume
The entire combustible world in one small room
As though dried straw, and if we turn about
The bare chimney is gone black out
Because the work had finished in that flare.
Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,
As 'twere all life's epitome.
What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?

XII

I had thought, seeing how bitter is that wind
That shakes the shutter, to have brought to mind
All those that manhood tried, or childhood loved
Or boyish intellect approved,
With some appropriate commentary on each;
Until imagination brought
A fitter welcome; but a thought
Of that late death took all my heart for speech.  

The poem’s first two stanzas begin with Yeats in his summer home, an ancient tower in Galway he purchased in 1917. As he sits there with his wife, he speaks of the departed friends who “cannot sup with us.” He and his wife “talk to some late hour,” then climb the “narrow winding stair to bed,” those dead “friends” still occupying his “thoughts.” He recalls times when his new and old friends would meet and how it disconcerted him if either were “cold” or quarrelsome with one another. But a sadness colors his thoughts, since not a “friend that I would bring” is alive to join in conversation.

The three of the friends Yeats has in mind are Lionel Johnson, John Synge, George Pollexfen, who each possessed a singular quality Yeats valued. In stanzas III-V, Yeats catalogues these friends according to their respective merits. Lionel Johnson was a friend Yeats met around 1888 or 1889. Yeats admired him for classical scholarship. Yeats met John Singe in Paris in 1896. Synge possessed a simple, creative spirit. George Pollexfen, Yeats’s maternal uncle, was a gifted athlete and horseman.

These friends have been dead for some time, and he compares his memory of them to looking through “some old picture-book.” He has become “accustomed to their lack of breath.” But the recent death of Robert Gregory still affects him profoundly. Gregory was the son of Lady Gregory, a close friend of Yeats, with whom he co-founded the Abbey Theatre. Robert Gregory was also Yeats’s friend, and it was he who encouraged Yeats to purchase Thoor Ballylee. After Lady Gregory received the news of her son’s death, she asked Yeats to write a poem honoring her son.

Robert Gregeory enters the poem in stanza VI, where Yeats quickly raises Gregory with the highest praise he could conceive, “Our Sidney and our perfect man.” He identifies him with Sir Philip Sidney “Our Sidney” and nominates him “our perfect man.” Sir Philp Sidney (1554-1586) was a courtier, scholar, soldier and poet who died fighting the Spanish in 1586 was considered one of the most brilliant men of the Renaissance. To Yeats, Gregory is the modern epitome of this renaissance man.

In stanzas VII-X, Yeats recalls Robert Gregory’s specific qualities. Gregory was a remarkably sensitive young man. He “loved and took delight” in all he saw and heard. He was no less warm-hearted toward those he met. Had he lived, “He might have been your heartiest welcomer.” His speed and daring on horseback surpassed all other riders, though his agile riding could not “keep pace” with the dexterous celerity of his mind. As an exceptional artist, Gregory’s passion doubled the artistic “discipline” of craft needed to produce great art. Finally, Gregory understood the finer “intricacies of a house” and he even “counselled” Yeats and his wife on how to improve their “Tower.”

A “Soldier, scholar, horseman,” Gregory embodied all that is perfection, and “life’s epitome.” Yeats asks, “What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?” How could perfection last into old age? In the last stanza, Yeats brings together the three men whom he ruminated about, and then his elegy strikes the deepest note of mourning. As he has attempted “to have brought to mind” Johnson, Synge, and Pollexfen to illustrate all Gregory’s attributes, a “bitter…wind…shakes” his imagination, and “a thought / Of that late death took all my heart for speech.”

Like Robert Gregory, Renee Good and Alex Pretti have their eulogizers. Their deaths will forever cause anguish. The qualities for which they will be remembered will forever console and sadden their families and friends. They died trying to help the victims of Trump’s wanton cruelty.