Poem of the Day: Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Manche freilich müssen drunten sterben, 

Many, to be sure, must die down there

Wo die schweren Ruder der Schiffe streifen, 

 where the heavy oars of the ship scrape,

Andre wohnen bei dem Steuer droben, 

Others dwell above at the helm

Kennen Vogelflug und die Länder der Sterne. 

and know the flight of birds and the realms of the stars.

Manche liegen immer mit schweren Gliedern

Many lie forever with heavy limbs

Bei den Wurzeln des verworrenen Lebens,

at the roots of obscure life,

Andern sind die Stühle gerichtet 

others have chairs placed for them

Bei den Sibyllen, den Königinnen, 

with the Sibyls, the queens, 

Und da sitzen sie wie zu Hause, 

and they sit there as if at home,

Leichten Hauptes und leichter Hände. 

with light heads and light hands.

Doch ein Schatten fällt von jenen Leben 

Still, a shadow falls from those other lives

In die anderen Leben hinüber,

across these lives, 

Und die leichten sind an die schweren 

and the light and the heavy

Wie an Luft und Erde gebunden: 

are bound together as to the air and the earth: 

Ganz vergessener Völker Müdigkeiten

The weariness of quite forgotten people

Kann ich nicht abtun von meinen Lidern,

I can't shut away with my eyelids

Noch weghalten von der erschrockenen Seele

nor hold off from my horrified soul

Stummes Niederfallen ferne Sterne.

the silent fall of distant stars.

Viele Geschicke weben neben dem meinen,

Many fates are woven next to my own,

Durcheinander spielt sie alle das Dasein,

existence mixes them all up together,

Und mein Teil is mehr als dieses Lebens

and my share is more than this life's

Schlanke Flamme oder schmale Leier.

slender flame or thin lyre.

--Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Hofmannsthal is now probably best known to opera buffs as the librettist for Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Elektra and other opera. But he was a fine poet whose poems have a haunting melancholy about them, a kind of Austrian Weltschmerz. Even his librettos have something of this -- if you know the Strauss operas, think of the Marschallin's meditation on time and aging, Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding, and Ariadne's invocation of death, Es gibt ein Reich.  

Poem of the Day: Paul Verlaine

Art poétique 

De la musique avant toute chose, 

Music before everything else,

Et pour cela préfère l'Impair 

and for that matter, prefer the odd,

Plus vague et plus soluble dans l'air, 

more undefined and more soluble in the air,

Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.

with nothing in it that's heavy or static.

Il faut aussi que tu n'ailles point 

And you must never set out

Choisir tes mots sans quelque méprise; 

to choose your words without some imprecision;

Rien de plus cher que le chanson grise 

there's nothing dearer than a song that's cloudy,

Où l'Indécis au Précis se joint.

in which the indistinct and the precise are joined.

C'est de beaux yeux derrière des voiles, 

It's beautiful eyes behind veils;

C'est le grand jour tremblant de midi,

it's broad daylight trembling at noon;

C'est par un ciel d'automne attiédi, 

it's, cooled by an autumn sky,

Le bleu fouillis des claires étoiles!

the blue jumble of bright stars!

Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,

For we want nuance,

Pas la couleur, rien que la Nuance!

not color, nothing but nuance!

Oh! la nuance seule fiance 

Oh, only nuance joins together

Le rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor! 

Dream to dream and flute to horn!

Fuis du plus loin la Pointe assassine, 

Stay far away from the murderous barb, 

L'Esprit cruel et le Rire impur, 

cruel wit and impure laughter --

Qui font pleurer les yeux de l'Azur, 

which bring tears to heaven's eyes --

Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine!

and all that other garlic of bad cuisine!

Prends l'éloquence et tords-lui son cou! 

Take eloquence and wring its neck!

Tu feras bien, en train d'énergie, 

You'll do well, while you've got the strength, 

De rendre en peu la Rime assagie.

to make rhyme a little smarter. 

Si l'on n'y veille, elle ira jusqu'ou?

If you don't pay attention to it, where will it wind up? 

O qui dira les torts de la rime!

O who can tell the wrongs done by rhyme!

Quel enfant sourd ou quel nègre fou 

What dull child or mad Negro

Nous a forgé ce bijou d'un sou

created for us this worthless jewel

Que sonne creux et faux sous la lime?

that sounds hollow and fake when put to the test?

De la musique encore et toujours! 

Music again and forever!

Que ton vers soit la chose envolée

Let your verse be a thing that flies

Qu'on sent qui fuit d'une âme en allée

so it feels like a soul traveling

Vers d'autres cieux à d'autres amours.

to other skies and other loves.

Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure

May your verse be a fine adventure

Éparse au vent crispé du matin

scattered to the blustery morning wind 

Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym ... 

that smells of mint and thyme ... 

Et tout le reste est littérature.

Everything else is literature.

--Paul Verlaine

Traduttore, traditore.That's an Italian pun which means "translator, traitor." Nice that the joke is lost in translation, because that's the point. 

I used to want to be a professional translator, and for my senior thesis in college (I had a double major in English and German), I translated a previously untranslated (so far as my professor knew) novella by Adalbert Stifter called Die drei Schmiede ihres Schicksals. I was in trouble right from the start because of the title, which means, literally, "The Three Smiths of Their Fates." But you can't call it that because it isn't really English. I finally settled on (I think) "Three Who Forged Their Fate." Which still stinks because "forge" means "fake" as well as "create in a foundry," and I was going for the latter meaning. (It occurs to me now that the best translation might have been something like "Three Self-Made Men.")

I'm going on about this (too long) because I wanted to mix things up here a little and post some poems in languages other than English. I used to read enough French, German and Latin to pass reading examinations in those languages, so I've still got some volumes of them around. So I pulled out my old copy of The Oxford Book of French Verse and picked out this famous poetic manifesto by Verlaine figuring I'd find a good translation of it on the Web. But the translations I found were all struggling to follow Verlaine's meter and rhyme scheme. When they hit on a rhyme, they had to wrench the meaning out of shape. (O qui dira les torts de la rime! indeed.) 

Finally, I decided to do a prose translation myself, which is what you see up there, interlineated with Verlaine. It's cobbled together using some of the online translations as a cheat sheet, plus I looked up a lot of words in the invaluable Google Dictionary. I've tried not to lose much in translation, but even in prose I had to cheat -- just as with the Stifter novella, there are some phrases that just don't sound like English if you translate them literally.  Pardonnez-moi, M. Verlaine!

High Tech, Low Tech, and Dead Tech

Geoffrey K. Pullum finds an anachronism: 

Sticking a label on a manila file of household papers this morning I noticed that the instructions on the sheet of labels said "Insert opposite end into typewriter." It wasn't so much the ridiculous controllingness that made me smile (the labels had no header strip, so they were symmetrical, and it would make absolutely no difference if you used the sheet one way up rather than the other); it was the quaint old lexical item typewriter. I wonder what young people would think of that advice, if they ever read the instructions on anything (they don't, of course; they learn the operating systems of their new cellphones by intuition). A typewriter? When did I last even see one? It was like coming upon a word like "spats" or "snuffbox" or "inkwell" in a modern business context. I wonder if the wording will survive unnoticed on every sheet of labels manufactured by that company until the phrase has become a sort of dead metaphor or incomprehensible incantation.

The comments on this Language Log item are kind of fun, too.  

Poem of the Day: Marianne Moore

What Are Years?    

   What is our innocence, 
what is our guilt? All are 
   naked, none is safe. And whence 
is courage: the unanswered question, 
the resolute doubt -- 
dumbly calling, deafly listening -- that 
in misfortune, even death, 
      encourages others 
      and in its defeat, stirs 

   the soul to be strong? He 
sees deep and is glad, who 
   accedes to mortality 
and in his imprisonment rises 
upon himself as 
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be 
free and unable to be, 
      in its surrendering 
      finds its continuing. 

  So he who strongly feels, 
behaves. The very bird, 
   grown taller as he sings, steels 
his form straight up. Though he is captive, 
his mighty singing 
says, satisfaction is a lowly 
thing, how pure a thing is joy. 
      This is mortality, 
      this is eternity. 

-- Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore was famous for her three-cornered hat and her love of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and if she's famous at all today, it's probably for her poem about poetry called "Poetry," which is in almost every anthology used in introduction-to-poetry courses. It's the one with the line about "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." So people were shocked when the 1967 edition of The Collected Poems of Marianne Moore was published and she had revised "Poetry" to read as follows, in its entirety: 

I, too, dislike it.

    Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in 

    it, after all, a place for the genuine.

I suspect a lot of poets would like to cut the hell out of their anthology pieces, especially if they're always being asked "What did you mean by ...?" 

I find a lot of Moore's poems a little too arch and clever, but there are three or four that I really cherish. Her poem "Peter" is one of the few poems about a cat to rival Christopher Smart's. "What Are Years?" is often read as a simple inspirational poem of the "stand up straight, wash your hands, eat your vegetables" variety. And to some extent it is just that. But there's real emotional anguish leading to the recognition that "satisfaction is a / lowly thing" that comes only to the humble. She has found in it a place for the genuine: She knows why the caged bird sings.   

Poem of the Day: John Milton

From Paradise Lost, Book IV, lines 205-318 

Beneath him with new wonder now he views
To all delight of human sense expos'd
In narrow room Nature's whole wealth, yea more,
A Heaven on Earth: for blissful Paradise
Of God the Garden was, by him in the East
Of Eden planted; Eden stretch'd her Line
From Auran Eastward to the Royal Tow'rs
Of Great Seleucia, built by Grecian Kings,
Or where the Sons of Eden long before
Dwelt in Telassar; in this pleasant soil
His far more pleasant Garden God ordain'd;
Out of the fertile ground he caus'd to grow
All Trees of noblest kind for sight, smell, taste; 
And all amid them stood the Tree of Life,
High eminent, blooming Ambrosial Fruit
Of vegetable Gold; and next to Life
Our Death the Tree of Knowledge grew fast by,
Knowledge of Good bought dear by knowing ill.
Southward through Eden went a River large,
Nor chang'd his course, but through the shaggy hill
Pass'd underneath ingulft, for God had thrown
That Mountain as his Garden mould high rais'd
Upon the rapid current, which through veins
Of porous Earth with kindly thirst up-drawn,
Rose a fresh Fountain, and with many a rill
Water'd the Garden; thence united fell
Down the steep glade, and met the nether Flood,
Which from his darksome passage now appears,
And now divided into four main Streams,
Runs diverse, wand'ring many a famous Realm
And Country hereof needs no account,
But rather to tell how, if Art could tell,
How from that Sapphire Fount the crisped Brooks,
Rolling on Orient Pearl and sands of Gold,
With mazy error under pendant shades
Ran Nectar, visiting each plant, and fed
Flow'rs worthy of Paradise which not nice Art
In Beds and curious knots, but Nature boon
Pour'd forth profuse on Hill and Dale and Plain,
Both where the morning Sun first warmly smote
The open field, and where the unpierc't shade
Imbrown'd the noontide Bow'rs: Thus was this place,
A happy rural seat of various view:
Groves whose rich Trees wept odorous Gums and Balm,
Others whose fruit burnisht with Golden Rind
Hung amiable, Hesperian Fables true,
If true, here only, and of delicious taste:
Betwixt them Lawns, or level Downs, and Flocks
Grazing the tender herb, were interpos'd,
Or palmy hillock, or the flow'ry lap
Of some irriguous Valley spread her store,
Flow'rs of all hue, and without Thorn the Rose;
Another side, umbrageous Grots and Caves
Of cool recess, o'er which the mantling Vine
Lays forth her purple Grape, and gently creeps
Luxuriant; meanwhile murmuring waters fall
Down the slope hills, disperst, or in a Lake,
That to the fringed Bank with Myrtle crown'd,
Her crystal mirror holds, unite thir streams,
The Birds thir choir apply; airs, vernal airs,
Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune
The trembling leaves, while Universal Pan
Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance
Led on th'Eternal Spring. Not that fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gath'ring flow'rs
Herself a fairer Flow'r by gloomy Dis
Was gather'd, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world; nor that sweet Grove
Of Daphne by Orontes, and th' inspir'd
Castalian Spring might with this Paradise
Of Eden strive; nor that Nyseian Isle
Girt with the River Triton, where old Cham,
Whom Gentiles Ammon call and Lybian Jove,
Hid Amalthea and her florid Son,
Young Bacchus, from his Stepdame Rhea's eye;
Nor where Abassin Kings thir issue Guard,
Mount Amara, though this by some suppos'd
True Paradise under the Ethiop Line
By Nilus head, enclos'd with shining Rock,
A whole day's journey high, but wide remote
From this Assyrian Garden, where the Fiend
Saw undelighted all delight, all kind
Of living Creatures new to sight and strange:
Two of far nobler shape erect and tall,
Godlike erect, with native Honor clad
In naked Majesty seem'd Lords of all,
And worthy seem'd, for in thir looks Divine
The image of thir glorious Maker shone,
Truth, Wisdom, Sanctitude severe and pure,
Severe, but in true filial freedom plac't;
Whence true authority in men; though both
Not equal, as thir sex not equal seem'd;
For contemplation hee and valor form'd,
For softeness shee and sweet attractive Grace,
Hee for God only, shee for God in him:
His fair large Front and eye sublime declar'd
Absolute rule; and Hyacinthine Locks
Round from his parted forelock manly hung
Clust'ring, but not beneath his shoulders broad:
Shee as a veil down to the slender waist
Her unadorned golden tresses wore
Dishevell'd, but in wanton ringlets wav'd
As the Vine curls her tendrils, which impli'd
Subjection, but requir'd with gentle sway,
And by her yielded, by him best receiv'd,
Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,
And sweet reluctant amorous delay.
Nor those mysterious parts were then conceal'd,
Then was not guilty shame: dishonest shame
Of Nature's works, honor dishonorable,
Sin-bred, how have ye troubl'd all mankind
With shows instead, mere shows of seeming pure,
And banisht from man's life his happiest life,
Simplicity and spotless innocence.

-- John Milton 

Milton seems to me the third greatest poet in English, after Shakespeare and Chaucer, particularly for his ability to roll like thunder in great cascades of blank verse. I read these lines aloud (well, under my breath) as I was typing them, and it made me aware once again how much mastery he had over the sound of the language, and the various tricks -- assonance, alliteration, chiasmus ("Flow'rs of all hue, and without Thorn the Rose"), oxymoron ("coy submission, modest pride"), and so on -- that he brings to his verse. 

Of course, one reason I'm aware of all these things is that my copy of Paradise Lost is heavily scribbled over with the notes I took from my grad-school Milton course, which was taught by Douglas Bush. There was nothing Miltonic about Mr. Bush himself; he was a small, elderly man (though at the time he taught me he was probably younger than I am today) with a dry (oh, hell, it was dull) classroom delivery. But he knew his Milton. There's a probably apocryphal story that someone once asked him about a trip he took by train from Boston to Los Angeles, and Bush said that it was unfortunate that he forgot to bring a book with him. "But, Mr. Bush," the other person said, "I thought you used to recite poetry to yourself when you didn't have a book with you." "I did," said Bush. "But Paradise Lost only got me as far as St. Louis." 

For his course, we had to memorize a certain number of lines from Paradise Lost ourselves, and write them out on the final exam. I chose the passage beginning "Not that fair field / Of Enna..." which is why I posted it here. (My friend Russell Merritt decided to memorize one of Milton's Latin poems, and since his room was next to mine in the dormitory, I got to listen to him recite it and act as prompter. It begins: "In se perpetuo tempus revolubile gyro..." but that's all I remember. I'll bet Russell can still remember all of it.) 

Mr. Bush's particular bêtes noires were critics who subscribed to the idea that Milton was of the devil's party without knowing it, an idea proclaimed by Blake and picked up by Byron and Shelley, among others. The fact remains, however, that Satan is the most compelling figure in Paradise Lost, and his defiance of authority is immensely attractive. The passage above is actually from Satan's point of view -- his first glimpse of Eden -- as Milton reminds us when he notes that "the Fiend / Saw undelighted all delight."

Mr. Bush was around before feminist criticism gained the influence it has today, but he was defensive about what may as well be called sexism in the poem (e.g.,  "Not equal, as thir sex not equal seem'd; / For contemplation hee and valor form'd, / For softeness shee and sweet attractive Grace, / Hee for God only, shee for God in him"). It is pretty indefensible from a modern point of view. But Milton had an unhappy marriage -- lord knows he was hard to live with -- and he argued for a kind of "no-fault" divorce in several pamphlets that got him in trouble with the authorities. That trouble also influenced his famous argument against censorship in Areopagitica, where he wrote, "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat." Milton was a pretty complicated man. 

Actually, the best that can be said about Milton is that he wrote Paradise Lost, which, whatever you may think of its theology (and I don't think much of it myself), is a magnificent, if daunting, work of art. Samuel Johnson admired it too, but even he observed, "None ever wished it longer." 

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

Barney Frank tries to fight the right-wing lie machine: 

This is what American political discourse has sunk to. 

Poem of the Day: Andrew Marvell

The Garden 

How vainly men themselves amaze 

To win the palm, the oak, or bays; 

And their uncessant labours see

Crown'd from some single herb or tree, 

Whose short and narrow verged shade 

Does prudently their toils upbraid; 

While all flow'rs and all trees do close 

To weave the garlands of repose. 

Fair quiet, have I found thee here, 

And innocence thy sister dear! 

Mistaken long, I sought you then 

In busy companies of men. 

Your sacred plants, if here below, 

Only among the plants will grow. 

Society is all but rude, 

To this delicious solitude.

No white nor red was ever seen 

So am'rous as this lovely green. 

Fond lovers, cruel as their flame, 

Cut in these trees their mistress' name. 

Little, alas, they know, or heed, 

How far these beauties hers exceed! 

Fair trees! wheres'e'er your barks I wound, 

No name shall but your own be found. 

When we have run our passions' heat, 

Love hither makes his best retreat. 

The Gods, that mortal beauty chase, 

Still in a tree did end their race. 

Apollo hunted Daphne so, 

Only that she might laurel grow, 

And Pan did after Syrinx speed, 

Not as a nymph, but for a reed. 

What wond'rous life in this I lead! 

Ripe apples drop about my head; 

The luscious clusters of the vine 

Upon my mouth do crush their wine; 

The nectarine and curious peach, 

Into my hands themselves do reach; 

Stumbling on melons, as I pass, 

Insnar'd with flow'rs, I fall on grass. 

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasures less, 

Withdraws into its happiness: 

The mind, that ocean where each kind 

Does straight its own resemblance find; 

Yet it creates, transcending these, 

Far other worlds, and other seas; 

Annihilating all that's made 

To a green thought in a green shade. 

Here at the fountain's sliding foot, 

Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root, 

Casting the body's vest aside, 

My soul into the boughs does glide: 

There like a bird it sits, and sings, 

Then whets, and combs its silver wings; 

And, till prepar'd for longer flight, 

Waves in its plumes the various light.

Such was that happy garden-state, 

While man there walk'd without a mate: 

After a place so pure, and sweet, 

What other help could yet be meet! 

But 'twas beyond a mortal's share 

To wander solitary there: 

Two paradises 'twere in one 

To live in paradise alone. 

How well the skillful gardener drew  

Of flow'rs and herbs this dial new; 

Where from above the milder sun 

Does through a fragrant Zodiac run;  

And, as it works, th'industrious bee

Computes its time as well as we. 

How could such sweet and wholesome hours 

Be reckon'd but with herbs and flow'rs! 

-- Andrew Marvell

Marvell is my favorite 17th century poet -- excluding Shakespeare, who really belongs mostly to the 16th century, but not excluding Milton, whom I admire more than enjoy. This is a much commented-on poem, and I don't want to add commentary to it. I'd rather go think some green thoughts.

Poem of the Day: Rudyard Kipling

The White Man's Burden   

Take up the White Man's burden -- 

    Send forth the best ye breed -- 

Go bind your sons to exile 

   To serve your captives' need; 

To wait in heavy harness 

   On fluttered folk and wild -- 

Your new-caught, sullen peoples, 

   Half devil and half child. 

Take up the White Man's burden -- 

   In patience to abide, 

To veil the threat of terror 

   And check the show of pride; 

By open speech and simple, 

   An hundred times made plain, 

To seek another's profit, 

   And work another's gain. 

Take up the White Man's burden -- 

   The savage wars of peace -- 

Fill full the mouth of Famine 

   And bid the sickness cease; 

And when your goal is nearest 

   The end for others sought, 

Watch Sloth and heathen Folly 

   Bring all your hope to nought. 

Take up the White Man's burden -- 

   No tawdry rule of kings, 

But toil of serf and sweeper -- 

   The tale of common things. 

The ports ye shall not enter, 

   The roads ye shall not tread, 

Go make them with your living, 

   And mark them with your dead! 

Take up the White Man's burden -- 

   And reap his old reward: 

The blame of those ye better, 

   The hate of those ye guard -- 

The cry of hosts ye humour 

   (Ah, slowly!) toward the light -- 

"Why brought ye us from bondage, 

   "Our loved Egyptian night?" 

Take up the White Man's burden -- 

   Ye dare not stoop to less -- 

Nor call too loud on Freedom 

   To cloak your weariness; 

By all ye cry or whisper, 

   By all ye leave or do, 

The silent, sullen peoples 

   Shall weigh your Gods and you. 

Take up the White Man's burden -- 

  Have done with childish days -- 

The lightly proffered laurel, 

   The easy, ungrudged praise. 

Comes now, to search your manhood 

   Through all the thankless years, 

Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom, 

   The judgment of your peers! 

-- Rudyard Kipling

Sometimes a bad poem is worth reading. And this is definitely a bad poem, not so much in its heavy-footed metrics and clunky, obvious rhymes, but in the racist, imperialist, colonialist message insisted on in the first line of each stanza. 

Every poem has a persona, of course, a speaker not to be identified with the poet. And it would be nice to be able to read this one as a dramatic monologue in the persona of a well-meaning imperialist of the 1890s. After all, Kipling won the Nobel Prize in Literature. But I'm afraid that I have to go along with George Orwell's view: 

It is no use pretending that Kipling's view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person. It is no use claiming, for instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating a 'nigger' with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in Kipling's work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct--on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have. Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. 

So why read him? To borrow another phrase from a Kipling poem: "Lest we forget -- lest we forget." Kipling's belief that "white men" have a moral duty to bring "civilization" to the "savages" is older than his poem: It was one of the "justifications" advanced by pre-Civil War Southerners for slavery. And you'll find it still, sometimes in coded form but sometimes not, in the pages of the National Review and the Weekly Standard. It is in the heart and soul of neoconservativism. It's what got us into Vietnam and Iraq. Although, if Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld had read Kipling's poem, they might have been warned that they wouldn't be greeted with flowers as liberators but with "The blame of those ye better, / The hate of those ye guard." One mitigating factor cited by Kipling's defenders is that he is clearly aware, in this poem and others, of the hard labor and the human cost of imperialism. Moreover, Kipling himself suffered that human cost with the loss of his only son in World War I.

To be fair, even Orwell had praise for Kipling's fiction, which demonstrates imagination and even empathy toward those "new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child." But as an antidote to the poison of "The White Man's Burden" you should read Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost or Caroline Elkins's Imperial Reckoning. 

Backward Into Medievalism

Andrew Sullivan on that poll on what Republicans believe:

It has a parallel in the way in which non-violent Islamists have doubled down on medievalism as they feel an overwhelming sense of their own failure to succeed in modernity. There is a profound insecurity and dysfunction in these subcultures which cannot make the transition to modern life and thereby surrender more totally to the ancient past and to hatred of those who succeed. The hatred of Obama - a clearly decent and obviously Christian man - is not about him. It's about them. It's about their resentment of a man who has integrated his own identity and made a place for himself in a pluralist world. They cannot do that - so, like Palin, they invent a world of ancient virtues and moral absolutes that they routinely fail to live up to in reality. I mean: look at Palin's family and Obama's. Whose is the more traditional? And yet Palin is allegedly the avatar of family values - and Obama is a commie subversive.

Poem of the Day: John Keats

Ode on a Grecian Urn 

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, 
    Thou foster child of silence and slow time, 
Sylvan historian, who cast thus express 
    A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: 
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape 
    Of deities or mortals, or of both, 
         In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? 
    What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? 
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? 
        What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? 

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard 
    Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; 
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, 
    Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: 
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave 
    Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; 
        Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, 
Though winning near the goal -- yet, do not grieve; 
    She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, 
        For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! 

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed 
    Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu; 
And, happy melodist, unwearied, 
    For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
    For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd, 
        For ever panting, and for ever young; 
All breathing human passion far above, 
    That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, 
        A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. 

Who are these coming to the sacrifice? 
    To what green altar, O mysterious priest, 
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, 
    And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? 
What little town by river or sea short, 
    Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, 
        Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? 
And, little town, thy streets for evermore 
    Will silent be; and not a soul to tell 
        Why thou art desolate, can e'er return. 

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede 
    Of marble men and maidens overwrought, 
With forest branches and the trodden weed; 
    Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought 
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! 
    When old age shall this generation waste, 
        Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe 
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
    "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all 
        Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

--John Keats

Back when I used to teach try to teach poetry to undergraduates, I told them that every poem has a plot, even the short ones. That was to get them away from trying to find the "moral" of the poem, or the prettiest lines. Otherwise, in this poem they'd run to the last two lines and tell me things like, "The poet is saying here that beauty is truth." Which we all know to be a lie.  

So I'd tell them that Keats's poem is like a five-act play, the typical structure of which is something like this:

I. Exposition 
II. Conflict 
III. Crisis 
IV. Struggle 
V. Resolution  

I. The exposition in Keats's first stanza tells us that someone is looking at (thanks to the title) a Greek urn, and has a lot of questions about the images on it. 

II. The conflict arises in the second stanza when the speaker tries to answer the questions by relating the images frozen in time on the urn to the world of change we know, in which music fades, leaves fall, and lovers consummate their relationship. 

III. This conflict reaches a crisis point in the third stanza when the speaker moves from a celebration of the happiness shown on the urn to a realization that human passion cloys and wearies. 

IV. So the struggle to make sense of the images continues when he looks at another side of the urn on which some sort of religious procession is taking place, but imagines that the figures have come from a town to which they can never return. 

V. Which leads us to the fifth stanza's resolution: an admission that we are teased out of thought by the urn's impossibly idealized vision of human life, one in which joy never fades. So why is it a "friend to man" if it tells us a lie, if it's a "Cold Pastoral" representation of warm and mutable and messy existence? For some that's a flaw in the poem, a flat-out contradiction of everything that has gone before. 

But if we think of the poem as a drama, as the struggle of the poem's speaker to come to terms with art and life, then the lie is understandable. I think Keats's point is that art presented his speaker with an image of beauty -- of unfading love, of things immutable and immortal -- that we can hold as an eternal verity, something about us that will still be around when our generation has faded, changed, and died. The urn is a friend to humankind for much the same reason that we cherish the snapshots in our photo albums: they are a permanent record of the way we once were and will never be again. Whether we regard this truth as a melancholy one or a happy one is up to us, but there is a kind of beauty about it. 


And my point is that a poem is more than the sum of its parts, however dazzling or quotable those parts may be.  Understanding its structure is essential to understanding what it has to tell us.