An affirming flame
Poems for troubled times
Last night I turned to Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and read several poems, but far more appropriate are the two I just received in an email from Allen Guttmann, and share with you here. Allen writes that during the Cuban Missile Crisis and after 9/11 he discarded his lesson plans and asked his students to read and talk about W H Auden’s poem, "September 1, 1939," which deals with both despair and affirmation. And today he added a poem by Robinson Jeffers called “Shine, Perishing Republic.”
Allen is one of the special people I met in early days as a publisher here in the US. I drove to Amherst College on an autumn morning to meet him, my objective being to persuade him to join a project on world sport that my fledging company had been asked to develop. Although he taught English and American Studies, he had written several books about sports and had been recommended as the expert I needed.
Over lunch at the faculty club, looking out on distant glowing hills, he told me he had taken an oath never to edit a work with living contributors. Over the years we worked together, he would occasionally tell the story of how I had cast a spell, persuading him against his good judgment to join my board.
It was a happy collaboration, and grew to be a warm friendship based more on literature than the study of sports, and enhanced by meetings both here in western Massachusetts and at far flung conferences. Allen’s work and friendships spanned the globe. It was somehow no surprise to learn that Allen meant a good deal to Bill Alford, a professor at Harvard Law School whose path I crossed not long after getting involved in Chinese studies, who had been an undergraduate at Amherst.
His writing on sports was always something special - ranging from spectatorship to art, from the Olympic Games to the first comprehensive history of women’s sports. His prose was impeccable, his scholarship awesome in its international scope. He raised the standard of any work he contributed to. And we liked working together. By the time I was developing the International Encyclopedia of Women and Sports for Macmillan, it was actually quite easy to get him to join me and Gertrud Pfister as co-editors.
He continued to contribute fascinating long essays to Berkshire publications, and I’ll always be grateful for that. And messages like the one this morning, with the two poems you’ll find below, make me feel blessed by his friendship. These are poems for troubled times, but do read to the end: there is a message for us today, as we reach out, stay connected, and prepare for the work ahead.
Shine, Perishing Republic (1925)
By Robinson Jeffers
While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.
You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught — they say — God, when he walked on earth.The second poem is more familiar, titled with the date Germany invaded Poland, an action that was the official beginning of World War II (war was declared by Britain two days later, but if you read accounts from that year it’s clear that everyone knew the invasion meant war). (And here’s an interesting analysis of the poem from the London Magazine - it’s clear and informative, not literary jargon.)
Both poems are about the world as it was then. I wonder who can distill for us the world as it is now?
September 1, 1939
By W. H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.One thing that strikes me about this poem is that when Britain declared war on September 3rd, Neville Chamberlain, known for trying to appease Hitler, was still prime minister. There was much shuffling of leadership in the first months of the war, and much uncertainty about what lay ahead. But the work began, leaders came to the fore, and citizens adapted to new realities.
PS: There were bluebirds outside this morning, and Carolina wrens singing. The birdbath at the end of the deck is providing popular with many birds. It’s such a simple and inexpensive attraction year-round.
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