Moment of Silence -- Emmanuel Ortiz Part 2

A beautiful poem. Again, sans comments....

The wikipedia entry has the following to say...

Moment of Silence is a controversial poem by Emmanuel Ortiz published on September 11, 2002, the first anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 attacks. The poem links the history of colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, the War on Terror, environmental racism, and structural violence to the attacks.

The poem goes on to critique the notion of a moment of silence, perhaps best summed up by the lines: "From somewhere within the pillars of power, you open your mouth to invoke a moment of our silence and we are all left speechless" and "This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written." The majority of the poem serves as a list of historical crimes by the West against indigenous peoples or the Third World and how the structures which perpetuate those crimes slip through the cracks whenever people take a "moment of silence". Essentially, Ortiz believes a moment of silence "cut[s] in line" by failing to acknowledge previous and ongoing forms of structural violence.

A MOMENT OF SILENCE, BEFORE I START THIS POEM

Before I start this poem, I'd like to ask you to join me
In a moment of silence
In honor of those who died in the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon last September 11th.
I would also like to ask you
To offer up a moment of silence
For all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned,
disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes,
For the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S.

And if I could just add one more thing...
A full day of silence
For the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the
hands of U.S.-backed Israeli
forces over decades of occupation.
Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people,
mostly children, who have died of
malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year U.S.
embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem,
Two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa,
Where homeland security made them aliens in their own country.
Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Where death rained down and peeled back every layer of
concrete, steel, earth and skin
And the survivors went on as if alive.
A year of silence for the millions of dead in Vietnam - a people,
not a war - for those who
know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their
relatives' bones buried in it, their babies born of it.
A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of
a secret war ... ssssshhhhh....
Say nothing ... we don't want them to learn that they are dead.
Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia,
Whose names, like the corpses they once represented, have
piled up and slipped off our tongues.

Before I begin this poem.
An hour of silence for El Salvador ...
An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua ...
Two days of silence for the Guatemaltecos ...
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.
45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas
25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found
their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could
poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains.
And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of
sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and the west...

100 years of silence...
For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half
of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand
Creek,
Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears.
Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the
refrigerator of our consciousness ...

So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust.

Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won't be. Not like it always has
been.

Because this is not a 9/11 poem.
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.

This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written.
And if this is a 9/11 poem, then:
This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971.
This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa,
1977.
This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison,
New York, 1971.
This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.
This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told
The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and
Newsweek ignored.
This is a poem for interrupting this program.

And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children
Before I start this poem we could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit.

If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window
of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost.
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the
Penthouses and the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton's 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful
people have gathered.

You want a moment of silence
Then take it NOW,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand,
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all...Don't cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime. But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing...For our dead.

EMMANUEL ORTIZ, 11 Sep 2002.

Here's a link to an mp3 rendering of this poem!

I Wanted to Write an Anti-war Poem -- Emmanuel Ortiz Part 1

Emmanuel Ortiz is a Chicano (native born Mexican), a Puerto Rican, an Irish American.. but foremost an activist and a spoken-word poet. He works with the Minnesota Alliance for the indigenous Zapatistas. I've been reading his poems lately and I'm putting up two of his poems here, sans comments. They are to be read in entirety and given subsequent introspection.

I Wanted to Write an Anti-war Poem, But...

Ever since the war started,
One year ago today,
I have wanted to write an anti-war poem.
For each of the last 365 days
I have been trying to write
To voice my opinion
In opposition to this war.

But nothing has come out.

After five days of watching
And not watching
Bombs fall on Iraq
I thought I had it
When some white boy
During a soccer game
Told me to "go back to Baghdad"
And as my fists found his temples
In retaliation for the bombs that were obliterating theirs
I remember thinking to myself
Amidst the slow-motion home-movie haze
"This will make a great poem"
A poem about
How he mistook
Mesoamerica for Mesopotamia
Borinken for Babylon.
And why Baghdad
Instead of Brasilia, Beijing, Beirut, Bogotá, Bombay,
Even Bi-racialville U.S.A.

I swear I was gonna write a poem about that white boy
About how his words were acts of errorism
Misguided missiles
Missing their marks
Leaving brown bodies burning
Turning soccer fields into battlefields
Turning mosques and marketplaces into burial grounds
I wanted to write that poem
Testimony to our bodies
How they have always been battlefields
And burial grounds.

I wanted to tell that white boy off
In a poem
That said
Go back to Nazi Germany
Go back to Imperialist Britain
Go back to Hollywood
Go back to the Oval Office
Go back across the Mason-Dixie line
Go back to Oklahoma City
Go back to Jasper, Texas
Go back to the suburbs
Go back into every red-white and blue-blooded American home
Crawl back inside the weapon of mass distraction
That is the centerpiece of your living room
Back into the studios of CNN
You can go anywhere you want to, Mr. All-American White Boy
As long as you go
Back
Because where else do you go
When you've reached the top of the world?

Damn, I wanted to write that poem.

But I never did.

Instead
I traveled
Crisscrossing the country
Wrote and read other poems.
I think I wrote a poem for my brother
Who has never seen the island that gave birth to our grandmother
Wrote one for a lover
Who I lost to another
But no poems against war.
I played soccer
And video games
Watched the Super Bowl
Skipped the halftime show
But wrote no poems against the war

But I swear to you
I wanted to
Been meaning to
Write that anti-war poem
Even had deadlines
But then Haiti made headlines
And that war hit close to my ancestral home again
My heart was a hurricane
And I felt a need to start over again
Searching for the right words to say
As a grandchild of Borinken
To the people of neighboring Ayiti
To the heirs of Caonabo and Anacaona
Children of Toussaint L'Overture.

Wanted to write that poem
But there were rallies and meetings to attend
And I needed a new job
One where I wasn't plagued by white liberals
Asking where I come from
And trying to speak Spanish

Wanted to write my anti-war poem
Standing on firm ground
But I'm looking for a place to live
Can't tell you where I will call 'home' in a month
Been questioning where I call home even now

I wanted to write a poem
That meant something
That made a difference
That could stop bullets
Topple empires
A poem that would rebuild marketplaces
Breathe life back into burnt brown bodies
A poem that could cross rivers
With two names
Rio Grande y Bravo
Tigris and Dijla
Euphrates and Furat,
Traversing Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia

I swear
If these wars ever end
The one that rages always over there somewhere
And the one right here in my heart
If these wars ever end
If my brother ever makes it to Puerto Rico
If my lost lover ever comes back to me
If I ever find home
Work with meaning If the war that just wants peace and love
If that war over there
This war right here
If these wars
Ever end
If I can ever find a moment's quiet
Peace of mind
Then maybe
Just maybe
I'll write that poem.

Age of Tranquil Mistrust -- Wodehouse Nugget 2

From Something Fresh (aka, Something New [American edition]) --

Among the compensations of advancing age is a wholesome pessimism, which, though it takes the fine edge off of whatever triumphs may come to us, has the admirable effect of preventing Fate from working off on us any of those gold bricks, coins with strings attached, and unhatched chickens, at which ardent youth snatches with such enthusiasm, to its subsequent disappointment. As we emerge from the twenties we grow into a habit of mind that looks askance at Fate bearing gifts. We miss, perhaps, the occasional prize, but we also avoid leaping light-heartedly into traps.

It must be your fault -- Wodehouse Nugget 1

As a huge fan of P.G.Wodehouse's writing, I figured might as well start a series of quoting interesting Wodehouse-ian nuggets. This one is from Sam the Sudden.

It is a curious fact, and one frequently noted by philosophers, that every woman in this world cherishes within herself a deep-rooted belief, from which nothing can shake her, that the particular man to whom she has plighted her love is to be held personally blameworthy for practically all of the untoward happenings of life. The vapid and unreflective would call these things accidents, but she knows better. If she arrives at a station at five minutes past nine to catch a train that has already left at nine minutes past five, she knows that it is her Henry who is responsible, just as he was responsible the day before for a shower of rain coming on when she was wearing her new hat.

Omar Khayyam, the Rubaiyat and other stories

His name means tent maker. His most renowned book as a mathematician is "Treatise on Demonstration of the Problems of Algebra". He is supposed to have calculated the length of a year as 365.24219858156 days. He was made famous by Edward Fitzgerald in 1859 in a different field.

That was Omar Khayyam, the Persian mathematician, poet, astronomer, and philosopher, of course. Outside of Iran, thanks to Edward Fitzgerald, he's mostly famous for his Rubaiyat. Rubaiyat derives from Rubaiyaas, which derives from the Arabic word for the number 4, meaning a verse with four lines, or a quatrain. The Rubaiyat is a collection of Khayyam's quatrains -- he wrote 1000s of them. One of the more famous ones (Edward Fitzgerald's translation) --

The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Even though Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King, Jr. have quoted the above quatrain in their speeches (MLK, in his speech Why I oppose the war in Vietnam says, "It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home. Come home America. Omar Khayyám is right 'The moving finger writes and having writ, moves on.'"), probably Omar Khayyam's biggest contributions are in the fields of mathematics and astronomy. He wrote the Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra. Importantly he generalized the algorithm for solving cubic equations (and some higher power equations). In his book, Omar Khayyam has this to say --

From the Indians one has methods for obtaining square and cube roots, methods which are based on knowledge of individual cases, namely the knowledge of the squares of the nine digits 1², 2², 3² (etc.) and their respective products, i.e. 2 × 3 etc. We have written a treatise on the proof of the validity of those methods and that they satisfy the conditions. In addition we have increased their types, namely in the form of the determination of the fourth, fifth, sixth roots up to any desired degree. No one preceded us in this and those proofs are purely arithmetic, founded on the arithmetic of The Elements (of Euclid).

On the lighter side, an extremely hilarious and interesting take on the theatrical managers of 1920s in Broadway by Wodehouse (from Little Warrior urf Jill the Reckless).

Mr.Goble is a theatrical Manager on Broadway and is putting on a musical comedy written and financed by Mr. Pilkington from England. Wally is an established writer and composer. Mr.Goble has just come to the sets during practice and has cut out a line about a watermelon from the hero's script.

The gentleman who was playing the part of Lord Finchley, an English character actor who specialized in London "nuts," raised his eyebrows, annoyed. Like Mr Pilkington, he had never before come into contact with Mr Goble as stage-director, and, accustomed to the suaver methods of his native land, he was finding the experience trying. He had not yet recovered from the agony of having that water-melon line cut out of his part. It was the only good line, he considered, that he had. Any line that is cut out of an actor's part is always the only good line he has.

"The speech about Omar Khayyam?" he enquired with suppressed irritation.

"I thought that was the way you said it. All wrong! It's Omar of Khayyam."

"I think you will find that Omar Khayyam is the--ah--generally accepted version of the poet's name," said the portrayer of Lord Finchley, adding beneath his breath. "You silly ass!"

"You say Omar of Khayyam," bellowed Mr Goble. "Who's running this show, anyway?"

"Just as you please."

Mr Goble turned to Wally.

"These actors . . ." he began, when Mr Pilkington appeared again at his elbow.

"Mr Goble! Mr Goble!"

"What is it now?"

"Omar Khayyam was a Persian poet. His name was Khayyam."

"That wasn't the way I heard it," said Mr Goble doggedly. "Did you?" he enquired of Wally. "I thought he was born at Khayyam."

"You're probably quite right," said Wally, "but, if so, everybody else has been wrong for a good many years. It's usually supposed that the gentleman's name was Omar Khayyam. Khayyam, Omar J. Born 1050 A.D., educated privately and at Bagdad University. Represented Persia in the Olympic Games of 1072, winning the sitting high-jump and the egg-and-spoon race. The Khayyams were quite a well-known family in Bagdad, and there was a lot of talk when Omar, who was Mrs Khayyam's pet son, took to drink and started writing poetry. They had had it all fixed for him to go into his father's date business."

Mr Goble was impressed. He had a respect for Wally's opinion, for Wally had written "Follow the Girl" and look what a knock-out that had been. He stopped the rehearsal again.

"Go back to that Khayyam speech!" he said, interrupting Lord Finchley in mid-sentence.

The actor whispered a hearty English oath beneath his breath. He had been up late last night, and, in spite of the fair weather, he was feeling a trifle on edge.

"'In the words of Omar of Khayyam' . . ."

Mr Goble clapped his hands.

"Cut that 'of,'" he said. "The show's too long, anyway."

And, having handled a delicate matter in masterly fashion, he leaned back in his chair and chewed the end off another cigar.

Kubla Khan

Kubla Khan is one of my favorite poems. It is the sheer genius of a subconscious mind pushed to an elevated state by natural drugs. Kubla Khan is a magic that is never dissected, one is always content in the ecstasy of the flow of words, the sublime prosody. An extremely detailed analysis of this poem is available in John Spencer Hill's Coleridge Companion available online at an archived version of a UOttawa webpage. For some reason the University of Ottawa does not host this page anymore.

If you dont want to read the entire analysis, some interesting extracts follow:

... Kubla Khan is a fascinating and exasperating poem. Almost everyone has read it, almost everyone has been charmed by its magic, almost everyone thinks he knows what it is about -- and almost everyone, it seems, has felt impelled to write about it. It must surely be true that no poem of comparable length in English or any other language has been the subject of so much critical commentary. Its fifty-four lines have spawned thousands of pages of discussion and analysis. Kubla Khan is the sole or a major subject in five book-length studies; close to 150 articles and book-chapters (doubtless I have missed some others) have been devoted exclusively to it; and brief notes and incidental comments on it are without number. Despite this deluge, however, there is no critical unanimity and very little agreement on a number of important issues connected with the poem: its date of composition, its "meaning", its sources in Coleridge's reading and observation of nature, its structural integrity (i.e. fragment versus complete poem), and its relationship to the Preface by which Coleridge introduced it on its first publication in 1816...

... In a moment of rash optimism a notable scholar once began an essay by declaring that "We now know almost everything about Coleridge's Kubla Khan except what the poem is about". The truth of the matter, however, is that we know almost nothing conclusive about Kubla Khan, including what it is about.This flower plucked in Paradise (or on Parnassus) and handed down to us by Coleridge is, indeed, a miracle of rare device; but like all miracles it is largely elusive...

... By far the most intriguing question about this most intriguing of poems is "What does it mean?" -- if, indeed, it has or was ever intended to have any particular meaning. For the overwhelming majority of Coleridge's contemporaries, Kubla Khan seemed (as Lamb foresaw) to be no better than nonsense, and they dismissed it contemptuously. "The poem itself is below criticism", declared the anonymous reviewer in the Monthly Review (Jan 1817); and Thomas Moore, writing in the EdinburghReview (Sep 1816), tartly asserted that "the thing now before us, is utterly destitute of value" and he defied "any man to point out a passage of poetical merit" in it...

... While derisive asperity of this sort is the common fare of most of the early reviews, there are, nevertheless, contemporary readers whose response is both sympathetic and positive -- even though they value the poem for its rich and bewitching suggestiveness rather than for any discernible "meaning" that it might possess. Charles Lamb, for example, speaks fondly of hearing Coleridge recite Kubla Khan "so enchantingly that it irradiates & brings heaven & Elysian bowers into my parlour while he sings or says it"; and Leigh Hunt turns hopefully to analogies in music and painting in an effort to describe the poem's haunting but indefinable effect: "Kubla Khan is a voice and a vision, an everlasting tune in our mouths, a dream fit for Cambuscan and all his poets, a dance of pictures such as Giotto or Cimabue, revived and re-inspired, would have made for a Storie of Old Tartarie, a piece of the invisible world made visible by a sun at midnight and sliding before our eyes."...

... Throughout the nineteenth century and during the first quarter of the twentieth century Kubla Khan was considered, almost universally, to be a poem in which sound overwhelms sense. With a few exceptions (such as Lamb and Leigh Hunt), Romantic critics -- accustomed to poetry of statement and antipathetic to any notion of ars gratia artis -- summarily dismissed Kubla Khan as a meaningless farrago of sonorous phrases beneath the notice of serious criticism. It only demonstrated, according to William Hazlitt, that "Mr Coleridge can write better nonsense verses than any man in England" -- and then he added, proleptically, "It is not a poem, but a musical composition"...

... For Victorian and Early Modern readers, on the other hand, Kubla Khan was a poem not below but beyond the reach of criticism, and they adopted (without the irony) Hazlitt's perception that it must properly be appreciated as verbalised music. "When it has been said", wrote Swinburne of Kubla Khan, "that such melodies were never heard, such dreams never dreamed, such speech never spoken, the chief thing remains unsaid, and unspeakable. There is a charm upon [this poem] which can only be felt in silent submission of wonder". Even John Livingston Lowes -- culpable, if ever anyone has been, of murdering to dissect -- insisted on the elusive magic of Coleridge's dream vision: "For Kubla Khan is as near enchantment, I suppose, as we are like to come in this dull world." While one may track or attempt to track individual images to their sources, Kubla Khan as a whole remains utterly inexplicable -- a "dissolving phantasmagoria" of highly charged images whose streaming pageant is, in the final analysis, "as aimless as it is magnificent". The earth has bubbles as the water has, and this is of them...

... Generally speaking, however, the most popular view by far is that Kubla Khan is concerned with the poetic process itself. "What is Kubla Khan about? This is, or ought to be, an established fact of criticism: Kubla Khan is a poem about poetry"...

... The dream of Xanadu itself is an inspired vision... the artist's purpose is to capture such visions in words, but in attempting to do so he encounters two serious difficulties: first, language is an inadequate medium that permits only an approximation of the visions it is used to record, and, second, the visions themselves, by the time the poet comes to set them down, have faded into the light of common day and must be reconstructed from memory. Between the conception and the execution falls the shadow.... the vision of Kubla's Xanadu is replaced by that of a damsel singing of Mount Abora -- an experience more auditory than visual and therefore less susceptible of description by mere words...

With that, will hide behind the opium induced genius of Coleridge.

Kubla Khan

(or, a Vision in a Dream, a Fragment)

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

published in 1816, with the following Author's Preface:

"In the summer of the year 1797, the author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne [opium, most likely] had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purcha's Pilgrimage: 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.' The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external sense, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purpot of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!"

A Psalm of Life

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was easily one of the most popular and prolific American poets of the 19th century. As always the Wikipedia has a detailed page on the life and times of Longfellow.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica has this to say of Longfellow --

During his lifetime Longfellow was loved and admired both at home and abroad. In 1884 he was honoured by the placing of a memorial bust in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey in London, the first American to be so recognized. Sweetness, gentleness, simplicity, and a romantic vision shaded by melancholy are the characteristic features of Longfellow's poetry. He possessed great metrical skill, but he failed to capture the American spirit like his great contemporary Walt Whitman, and his work generally lacks emotional depth and imaginative power. Some years after Longfellow's death a violent reaction set in against his verse as critics dismissed his conventional high-minded sentiments and the gentle strain of Romanticism that he had made so popular. This harsh critical assessment, which tried to reduce him to the status of a mere hearthside rhymer, was perhaps as unbalanced as the adulation he had received during his lifetime. Some of Longfellow's sonnets and other lyrics are still among the finest in American poetry, and Hiawatha, "The Wreck of the Hesperus," Evangeline, and "Paul Revere's Ride" have become inseparable parts of the American heritage. Longfellow's immense popularity helped raise the status of poetry in his country, and he played an important part in bringing European cultural traditions to American audiences.

Today's poem titled A Psalm of Life was interestingly also titled (by Longfellow himself) A Psalm of Death, before Longfellow decidedly changed the title to meet the optimistic sentiment he gushes forth in the poem.

A Psalm of Life

What the heart of the young man said to the psalmist

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream! --
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, -- act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In one of the early stanzas Longfellow urges the reader to "Be not like dumb driven cattle, Be a hero in the strife". I think, and history stands in evidence and judgement, that any mass or gathering of people collectively does not think. Only individuals think. Masses have strength and can execute extraordinary tasks. But thinking stays the prerogative of the individual. Situation not withstanding. One can conceive extreme examples in Hitler or Advani as the individual and the Gestapo or Kar-Sevaks and other following as the masses; to a handful of researchers as the individual, and a large company as the mass, which can execute and build real products like computers, space ships, etc. I think Longfellow understood this and therefore exhorts his fellowmen to be thinking individuals, to be heroes in strife and not be like dumb driven cattle.

Of course, some memorable phrases like Footprints on the sands of Time and entire stanzas on Trust no future, Dead past bury its dead, Heart for any strife, Learn to labor and to wait -- the simple elegance with which Longfellow puts forth fairly well thought out concepts with astonishing ease, make this a much loved poem.

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

John Keats was exemplar of the turn of the 18th century romantic poets who had far reaching influence on poets to come long after his short 25 year lifespan. The ever-reliable Wikipedia has a well documented page on Keats. We'll, here, instead focus on today's poem, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.

Keats was so moved by the power and aliveness of Chapman's (George Chapman, 1559 - 1634) translation of Homer that he wrote this sonnet--after spending all night reading Homer with a friend. The poem expresses the intensity of Keats' experience; it also reveals how passionately he cared about poetry. To communicate how profoundly the revelation of Homer's genius affected him, Keats uses imagery of exploration and discovery. In a sense, the reading experience itself becomes a Homeric voyage, both for the poet and the reader.

First, the poem itself, before we start analyzing the sonnet:

On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet never did I breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific - and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise -
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

-- John Keats

As any Petrarchan sonnet, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" falls into two parts--an octet (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines). The octet describes Keats' reading experience before reading Chapman's translation and the sestet contrasts his experience of reading it. Keats builds up the scenario in the octet, with phrases like "Much have I travell'd" -- indicating the vastness of his reading, before talking about the triumphant entry Chapman's Homer makes in his literary universe in the sestet. Quite aptly, Keats chooses the metaphors of discovery in vast spaces, like a planet in the universe, or discovering the vast Pacific.

One, much-oft criticized point in the sonnet is that in reality it was Balboa the sailor who discovered the Pacific and not Cortez. An interesting theory proposed to reason this is that just as it was Homer who described the voyages of Odysseus and it was Chapman whose subsequent translation was what had caught Keats' heart and soul; the metaphor links to Cortez who repeated Balboa's original feat of viewing and describing the vastness of the Pacific.

I'll just end with what an anonymous writer has to say of Keats --

... more than any other writer before or since Shakespeare, he (Keats) had the ability to distil in its purest form that quality called 'poetry' in his verse. He doesn't use ornate or flowery language; his rhymes and rhythms are often less than perfect; his themes can be ordinary. And yet his words are just magical - pure music.

Ithaka

"The means are everything, the end matters not, ever." My grandfather never tired of telling me that when we were growing up. I would come back from school and tell him all that we learnt that day. He would nod indulgently, and unfailingly ask, "So you learnt all that today, what did you understand?". In keeping with what he preached, Constantine Cavafy's Ithaka was one of his favorite poems.

Cavafy's Ithaka is exactly just that. Ithaka is your goal, and the road to Ithaka is the fulfillment of that goal. Once you reach Ithaka, Ithaka has nothing left to give you any more.

Ithaka

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the journey is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon - don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon - you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
may there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbours seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind -
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.
without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

-- Constantine Cavafy

The World was Young, the Mountains Green -- or Why the Dwarves Chose to Live in Darksome Holes

These days, the writing of heroic fantasy has become a mass-production industry; scarcely a week goes by without an author inventing a brave new world and subsequently being acclaimed as "the true inheritor of Tolkien's mantle", or some such. Unfortunately, fantastic settings alone do not an epic make, and 90% of new fantasy writing is crap - the same generic swords and sorcery, thud and blunder, repeated ad nauseam.

Tolkien is different. His imaginary homelands are not just names on the (by now obligatory) frontispiece map, they're countries, with rich histories and vibrant cultures; his invented tongues are not meaningless agglomerations of random syllables, they're carefully designed showcases of the linguist's art, with comprehensive lexica and detailed etymologies; his many invented beings are not cardboard cutout monsters, they're creatures who live and breathe and walk the pages of his books as convincingly as do his human heroes and heroines. The suspension of disbelief in Tolkien is total.

And then there's his verse. Tolkien's verse has genuine poetic merit, and it's not in the least bit self-conscious; when his characters break into song (which, mind you, occurs fairly often in his books), it always seems the perfectly natural thing to do. Today's poem is an excellent example: in "The Fellowship of the Ring" (the first volume of "The Lord of the Rings"), the eponymous fellowship are forced to detour through the dark and deserted Dwarven mines of Moria. One of the party asks why the Dwarves chose to live in such darksome holes; in reply, Gimli, the lone representative of that race in the Fellowship, half sings, half chants a poem describing the glory of the Dwarven kingdom in the Elder Days... at the end of the recital, the reader is left with the realization that the story of Moria couldn't have been told any other way: mere prose is simply too dry to communicate the wonder and the beauty that was Khazad-dum.

As always with Tolkien, the form reinforces the content to marvellous effect: the language is intentionally archaic, the alliteration pronounced (but never obtrusive), the sense of nostalgia and loss almost palpable. Notice how Gimli never explicitly states just what it was that caused Moria's abandonment: his reticence seems to imply that the events being recounted occurred at a great remove from the here and now; this in turn enhances the mystery, the vague undercurrent of dread that runs through the poem (and especially through the last stanza). This lack of particularity might be annoying in what is ostensibly a historical tale, but this is definitely one of those cases where less is more: a straightforward cataloguing of facts could never hope to capture the audience's attention the way Gimli's hypnotically beautiful couplets do.

And beautiful they certainly are: Tolkien's feel for the English language, for the music of words and the perfection of images, is flawless. It's a pity that his poetic output was (by and large) limited to within the confines of his invented universe (wide though they were); he could easily have been this century's successor to Kipling and Tennyson, so perfect is his verse, so effortless his prosody...

The World was Young, the Mountains Green

The world was young, the mountains green,
No stain yet on the Moon was seen,
No words were laid on stream or stone,
When Durin woke and walked alone.
He named the nameless hills and dells;
He drank from yet untasted wells;
He stooped and looked in Mirrormere,
And saw a crown of stars appear,
As gems upon a silver thread,
Above the shadow of his head.

The world was fair, the mountains tall,
In Elder Days before the fall
Of mighty kings in Nargothrond
And Gondolin, who now beyond
The Western Seas have passed away:
The world was fair in Durin's Day.

A king he was on carven throne
In many-pillared halls of stone
With golden roof and silver floor,
And runes of power upon the door.
The light of sun and star and moon
In shining lamps of crystal hewn
Undimmed by cloud or shade of night
There shone for ever fair and bright.

There hammer on the anvil smote,
There chisel clove, and graver wrote;
There forged was blade, and bound was hilt;
The delver mined, the mason built.
There beryl, pearl, and opal pale,
And metal wrought like fishes' mail,
Buckler and corslet, axe and sword,
And shining spears were laid in hoard.

Unwearied then were Durin's folk;
Beneath the mountains music woke:
The harpers harped, the minstrels sang,
And at the gates the trumpets rang.

The world is grey, the mountains old,
The forge's fire is ashen-cold;
No harp is wrung, no hammer falls:
The darkness dwells in Durin's halls;
The shadow lies upon his tomb
In Moria, in Khazad-dum.
But still the sunken stars appear
In dark and windless Mirrormere;
There lies his crown in water deep,
Till Durin wakes again from sleep.

-- J. R. R. Tolkien

P.S.: Some stuff in the initial funda isnt mine, thanks to Amit, a friend of mine.

Lament for Boromir

The Lament for Boromir is very poignant. The most interesting part of this poem is that Legolas composes the second verse, and Aragorn composes the first and the third stanzas; while, Tolkien believes that in his plot, Legolas is a better poet than Aragorn, and brings that out in the imagery of the verses. The second stanza is far more poetically dense in terms of expression, poetic depth, even construction as opposed to the stanzas 1 and 3. Talk about getting into the character and writing in the moment!!

Through Rohan over fen and field where the long grass grows
The West Wind comes walking, and about the walls it goes.
'What news from the West, O wandering wind, do you bring to me tonight?
Have you seen Boromir the Tall by moon or by starlight?'
'I saw him ride over seven streams, over waters wide and grey;
I saw him walk in empty lands, until he passed away
Into the shadows of the North. I saw him then no more.
The North Wind may have heard the horn of the son of Denethor.'
'O Boromir! From the high walls westward I looked afar,
But you came not from the empty lands where no men are.'

From the mouths ofthe Sea the South Wind flies,from the sandhills andthe stones;
The wailing of the gulls it bears, and at the gate it moans.
'What news from the South, O sighing wind, do you bring to me at eve?
Where now is Boromir the fair? He tarries and I grieve.'
'Ask not of me where he doth dwell --- so many bones there lie
On the white shores and the dark shores under the stormy sky;
So many have passed down Anduin to find the flowing Sea.
Ask of the North Wind news of them the North Wind sends to me!'
'O Boromir! Beyond the gate the seaward road runs south,
But you came not with the wailing gulls from the grey sea's mouth.'

From the Gate of Kings the North Wind rides, and past the roaring falls;
And clear and cold about the tower its loud horn calls.
'What news from the North, O mighty wind, do you bring to me today?
What news of Boromir the Bold? For he is long away.'
'Beneath Amon Hen I heard his cry. There many foes he fought.
His cloven shield, his broken sword, they to the water brought.
His head so proud, his face so fair, his limbs they laid to rest;
And Rauros, golden Rauros-falls, bore him upon its breast.'
'O Boromir! The Tower of Gaurd shall ever northward gaze
To Rauros, golden Rauros-falls, until the end of days.'

-- J.R.R. Tolkien

Orwellian truths on how to write

George Orwell in 1946 published the essay Politics and the English Language lamenting the abuse of cliches in the English language.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Read the whole essay, its definitely worth the while of anyone even remotely interested in the language. Orwell summarizes his points with the following six suggestions to be followed when communicating in English --

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Link to couple more Orwellian articles -- Nonsense Poetry and In defence of P G Wodehouse.

Lament for Eorl the Young

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

-- J. R. R. Tolkien

Although these lines are purported as a Lament for Eorl the Young, the first king of Rohan, clearly, this is not simply a paean for one man or his heroic deeds. It is a lament for all who have passed away; the horseman and the minstrel, the tiller of fields and the harvester of crops, the woodsman, the woodcutter and the tender of household fires and affairs. The Rohirrim (Eorl's people) were a tribe of nomadic horsemen and pasturers, who settled down a few hundred years before the events in The Lord of the Rings. This song is a lament for the last of the nomadic chieftains (the aforementioned Eorl), who was also the first of the Kings of the Golden Hall (as his seat of power was called).

The stanza recited by Aragorn evokes vivid scenes of a vibrant society and though it is mournful in tone, it voices no regret. It is constructed as a series of queries regarding the whereabouts of horse, rider, horn, helm, hauberk, etc. and are answered by allusions to the natural order of things – death being integral to that order.

The final question that you ask "Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning, Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?" deviates from the preceding litany by asking for an identity. It is, pointedly left unanswered, however. As it regards the ceaseless flow of time and the unending cycles of the tides, a continuation of natural events is implied.

And even though all these are rhetorical questions, they are nevertheless addressed to the characters listening in the story – Gandalf, Legolas and Gimli - as well as to the reader. One might assume that the answer to the last question, the one who is left unidentified in the verse, at one level are these listeners, and yet at an other level the reader him/herself, the audience to these lines of collective memory.

Either way, the survivors of Middle-earth, are the ones who will hold and treasure these memories, pass them along to their inheritors and behold the flowing of years.

A few comments on the form, from Martin of the minstrels site: the poem is consciously modelled on Old English verse - specifically, in the rhyming-couplet scheme and the heavy alliteration. Indeed, Tolkien based the Rohirric language on Anglo-Saxon at a sort of meta-linguistic level - it (i.e., true Rohirric) bears the same relation to the Common Speech of the characters in the book as does Old English to our modern language. As you've probably realized by now, a large part of the seeming 'authenticity' of The Lord of the Rings stems from the author's attention to detail and his linguistic skills; Tolkien himself commented (on more than one occasion) that the languages of Middle Earth were the most important component of his 'sub-creation'.