Good poems echo down the ages
JOE BENNETT
One possibility is that even when the facts are trustworthy, they are rarely, if ever, delivered up without an agenda – Gingrich’s point. Companies want to sell stuff. Scientists want grants. Politicians want power. Environmental groups want donations. The media want advertising revenue. Not a day goes by when we are not bombarded by facts, distortions of facts, and the speculation to which they give rise – all to a purpose, sometimes benign and often not.
It’s no surprise that even the most credulous among us are leery of ‘facts’ and inclined to prefer anecdotal experience and belief, no matter how ill founded.
The consequences for our political discourse are both real and worrying.
In the US the collateral effect of allowing belief and feelings to trump fact has been the rejection of compromise as a tool of statecraft. There is no coming together of political opposites or the prospect of it. Adams’ ‘‘tyranny of the majority’’ now looms large.
If that’s not troubling enough, this disdain for objective truth and intelligent reasoning is happening at a time in our history where we can least afford it. We continue, as Noam Chomsky renders it, ‘‘our rush towards the precipice’’.
What do we do about it? At this stage we’re left only with mitigation and the knowledge that at a pinch we’re capable of dealing with inconvenient truths, even if we have to have our noses pressed up against them first.
As unfair as it is in the face of our vapid preoccupation with social media and reality TV, it’s to the traditional media we must look to do the pressing. They are still best equipped to do the job and with them there still remains at least a flicker of commitment to the idea that information is something other than entertainment. It is there too that we can look for a ghost of Edward R. Morrow – the 50s journalist of legend who stared McCarthyism in the eye and refused to blink.
There are corollaries. The wholesale wallowing in partisan editorialising has to go. Reliable fact-finding and analysis must not be hidden behind paywalls – they are of no value to a democracy there. The place of publicly funded media must be protected and enhanced.
But most critical of all is the need for each of us to demand more not just of the fourth estate, but also and most particularly of ourselves.
Doug Bailey is a legal and policy commentator.
Amonth ago I bought an anthology of short poems from the last 2000 years and put it in the lavatory. It was very cheap, partly because it’s printed on the sort of paper that befits its current location. But also because the poems are more than 50 years old so the publisher didn’t have to pay for them.
This seems unfair, of course. The poets wrote them and should profit from them, but the poets are dead so it hardly matters. And besides, one of their themes is that the world’s unfair, so they’d understand.
Good poems don’t date. Take for example the lines by Su T’ung Po (1037-1101) on the birth of his son. They remain as fresh as tomorrow morning. Po hopes that his son will prove ... ignorant and stupid. Then he will crown a tranquil life By becoming a cabinet minister.
Po may be 900 years dead, but he made me laugh. And he wouldn’t be at all surprised by the rise of Trump.
On the opposite page is a poem by Sadi, a Persian who lived, impressively, from 1184 to 1291. Indeed, a skim through the book shows that many of the ancients lived long lives, and all, astonishingly, without the help of dietary supplements, health foods, nutritional experts, wellness centres and other contemporary blessings.
Sadi’s poem offers dietary advice of a sort. If you become so poor, he says, that in the whole world you have only two loaves left, you should sell one. And with the proceeds you should buy ‘‘hyacinths to feed your soul’’.
I’ve now read most of the anthology. What emerges is the continuity. The events and themes and feelings that stirred the ancients to poetry are the same events and themes and feelings that stirred the comparatively moderns. And they are few.
The first is the loss of childhood. ‘‘Trailing clouds of glory do we come,’’ wrote Wordsworth (1770-1850), ‘‘from God who is our home. Heaven lies about us in our infancy.’’ But we only notice how glorious the clouds were when they’ve blown away. Childhood is wasted on children.
Then comes adulthood and an intense awareness of the opposite sex. But there is a gulf between the sexes and Coventry Patmore (1823-1896) saw it as a very wide gulf indeed. A woman is a foreign land, Of which, though there he settle young, A man will ne’er quite understand The customs, politics and tongue.
The urge to mate strikes men and women differently. William James (1842-1910) put it in simple terms. Hoggimus higgamus Men are polygamous. Higgamus hoggamus Women monogamous.
Amy Lowell (1874-1925) strikes the monogamous female note: When I go away from you, The world beats dead Like a slackened drum.
While hundreds of males strike the polygamous note. They call it love but they mean seduction. Their main weapon is flattery, as performed here by Richard Aldington (1892-1962): Like a gondola of green scented fruits, Drifting along the dank canals of Venice, You, O exquisite one, Have entered into my desolate city.
Or, 1200 years earlier, by Yakamochi (718-785): By way of pretext I said, ‘I will go And look at The condition of the bamboo fence.’ But it was really to see you.
When not sighing for the opposite sex, poets find consolation in the natural world. Typical is Robert Frost (1874-1963): The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued.
Many of the ancients lived long lives, and all, astonishingly, without the help of dietary supplements, health foods, nutritional experts, wellness centres and other contemporary blessings.
But behind the celebration comes dread. Time is marching and it does not stop. ‘‘Voracious Time devours all things,’’ wrote Seneca (3 BC to 65 AD) and the later poets have never ceased to echo him, including Shakespeare (1564-1616): Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end; Each changing place with that which goes before, In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
And that’s about that for major themes. In the light of which I now humbly present my own effort at a generic bloke’s poem from any time in the last 2000 years. (But if you want to anthologise it you’ll have to pay. Or wait.) His childhood was all innocent and happy. Then came trying to get women into bed. He found nature very pretty But then sank into self-pity When he realised, oh boo hoo, he’d soon be dead.