The Poem in Mind

 

People recall exactly where they were when history touches their lives. In 1945 my father heard the news of President Roosevelt’s death on the Armed Forces Radio Network. He was in the U.S. Army Air Corps and stationed on Guam. His job was to send coded messages to American submarines. “F.D.R. dead” he tapped and the first reply came back: “Say it ain’t so.”

Of course these stories are legion. Where were you when France was liberated, or when President Kennedy was assassinated? What were you doing on 9-11, or when you heard that Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa? Not only do we tell these stories, we need to tell them: it’s a building block of culture to share feelings that arise from the collisions of public and private experiences.

This need for suffused stories is in fact what poems are about though poets will argue about the ways and means. Robert Frost wrote intricate, metrical verse about rural Americans and accordingly his poems are stylized reinterpretations of what common folk might have said alone on their farms when the 20^th century was still new. In turn William Carlos Williams sought to create poetry that was freed from the classroom and sounded like the spoken language of common people. Still, whatever the approach, poetry finds the marriage between public and private, and while it is seldom reliable in the ways of journalism it tells us how the affairs of history become particulate and personal.

Now that we are some five months into the Obama administration it may be easy for some to allow themselves to forget the willful and dark effects of the prior presidency on what we might call the public’s morale. But for my part I will never forget those hopeless years because my solace in those days came in part from a sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley:

England in 1819

An old, mad, blind, despis’d, and dying king,

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow

Through public scorn–mud from a muddy spring,

Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,

But leech-like to their fainting country cling,

Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,

A people starv’d and stabb’d in the untill’d field,

An army, which liberticide and prey

Makes as a two-edg’d sword to all who wield,

Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay,

Religion Christless, Godless–a book seal’d,

A Senate–Time’s worst statute unrepeal’d,

Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may

Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

Shelley’s poem, written in a time of national exhaustion and extreme political corruption spoke to my subjective feelings about George W. Bush’s war in Iraq and the associated adoption of legalized spying on American citizens by a senate that neither saw nor felt nor cared what it was doing to our nation.

The poem continues to speak for my horror at the spectacle of the Christian fundamentalists who cry for the blood of abortion doctors or who call for the elimination of social programs that help the poor. One can still hear them daily. And one can hear the corporate media spinning right wing opposition to President Obama’s health care proposals and economic policies as if the United States isn’t really experiencing the greatest wave of unemployment and human suffering since the great depression; as if health care for our citizens should be a privilege and not a right; as if the bible should never be open to the New Testament but only the old—say a book like Leviticus.

And so Shelley’s poem is my poem in mind on many days. It reminds me of our recent national despair and of our present peril.

S.K.