As I’ve had to explain to various people today (not just on blogs) — many of them complaining about the risible quality of Obama’s inauguration poet (she really did evacuate the National Mall; they may as well’ve set off an air raid siren) – this is how you do public poetry. Below is Kipling’s ‘Recessional’, the poem that gave ‘Lest we Forget’ to the English language, as well as the beautiful line ‘/the Captains and the Kings depart/’. Written for Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, it is simultaneously a warning against hubris and a harbinger of Britain’s future, when — to paraphrase Harold Macmillan — she lost an empire and failed to find a role.
God of our fathers, known of old –
Lord of our far-flung battle line –
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine –
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget — lest we forget!
The tumult and the shouting dies –
The Captains and the Kings depart –
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget — lest we forget!
Far-called our navies melt away –
On dune and headland sinks the fire –
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget — lest we forget!
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe –
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law –
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget — lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard –
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding calls not Thee to guard.
For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!
Amen.
Now you’ve read that, read ‘Danny Deever‘, his chilling account of a military execution — timely, now, in light of Western armies scattered near and far — and realise that there is far more to Kipling than ‘White Man’s Burden’, for which he is so often excoriated.
UPDATE: Tim Train has footage, alas minus the bits that were featured on The Daily Show where the crowd ran for the exits.
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The British Empire had more going for it than the Fabian anti-colonialists and their desendants would understand or admit. Racism was a blot but the best aspects of the system – Westminister government, non-partisan and non-corrupt public administration, the rule of law – could have made the countries of the Empire the envy of all the others if they had not been subverted by racism of other kinds (check out Sri Lanka), socialism and the like. Some like India are still the best hope of the Third World.
Zounds, I missed the Obama inauguration – had to take my poor little fellow to get his immunizations. He’s a sad little baby today.
Anyway, after all the comments on the poetry, I had to look for the poetry recital on YouTube. And here’s a transcript of the poem. Just in case any other people were living under a rock like me and missed it.
Yeah, it wasn’t poetry to my taste, and it wasn’t well read either (I suspect she was very, very nervous).
LE said: “it wasn’t poetry to my taste”
Agreed. But then Americans don’t use a metric system!
Hah, yes Kipling. My favourite (from memory, but pretty close)
At the end of the fight
Stood the tombstone bright
With the name of the dear deceased
And the epitaph drear
A fool lies here
Who tried to hustle the East
It was a great consolation to those of us working in Asia.
Rafe’s comment is beyond parody and provides a fitting, if inadvertent juxtaposition to Kipling’s poem, which SL has neatly captured. Though I’d also note its religiosity and the assumptions of racial and other forms of cultural superiority. But, of course these are transhistorical phenomena.
I liked Elizabeth Alexander’s poem for what it is was saying and trying to do which meshed pretty much with Obama’s current message: celebration of the common people, our shared humanity, our sensuous experience of the world, the importance of work and love. Yeah, it was faux Whitmanesque and more and the delivery perhaps a tad ponderous.
It was a kind, thoughtful poem, though, not grandiose, and given it was presumably workshopped with Saint Obama it was comforting, in a transient sort of way.
My nomination for the dopiest observation about the inauguration is from Jamie Foxx (who he?) quoted apparently with approval by Manuel Roig-Franzia of the Washington Post and run in the Sydney Morning Herald:
” You can tell there’s a black president by the way he was moving”
Dave @ 3 – tee hee! The worst is those bloody gallons and quarts – I don’t have any idea of how much is in an American gallon off the top of my head.
KenN @ 6 – yes that is a monumentally dopey comment by Jamie.
Kipling might have subverted imperialist hubris in this poem, but now I think of it the poem’s philosophical content is a blatant rip-off of Omar Khayyam’s oeuvre. OK, (genuflect everyone) being the 11th century Persian scientist, astronomer, philosopher, poet, sybarite and sexual athlete who said in his’ Rubaiyat’ all and much more that Kipling did in this poem, minus, thankfully, the religious mystification and overt racism.
‘Whitman’, ‘metric’ and ‘system’ are three words that don’t necessarily go together.
Maybe Obama walked into Elizabeth Alexander’s office one day and said, ‘I’ll have a gallon of poetry, please, to go.’
Posey, I love Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat.
Tim T –
Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)
is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.
.
Poetry is what you find in the dirt in the corner? Well I guess it is now. And after the dead dog’s been there too. Jesus lady get a job!
Sorry about the pooch but it does remind of something a real poet once wrote:
Had he been a dog
That a howled thus
They’d a hung him.
Or her in this case. Jaysus. I reckon Snoop Dogg would’ve been better – seriously.
As long as Snoop wasn’t the dead Dogg.
Actually I reckon the Gift of Gab from Blackalicious would’ve done a fine job. Snoop would’ve gone better with Dubya – bust a cap in yaw ass – etc.
But GOG, he’s different.
You just trash her cos she’s a woman, Adrien.
Yeah, altruistic lurve sure is a tedious corny embarrassing bore.
She could’ve been a lil more Dylanesque.
“Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow..
/sob/
Very good, Dave and TimT. I shall be chuckling over both lines today.
Bob Dylan, now there’s a thought. I reckon he’d have pretty good chops as a public poet…
Also, too, Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat (one of my favourite exercises in poetry as a child) was a central part of the late Victorian canon. I think many poets (not just Kipling) would have been delighted if they could mimic its smooth style. Even so, much of the Rubaiyat is ironic and melancholic; Recessional manages to combine grandeur with a distinctly minatory tone. That is very rare, and something even Kipling only achieved spottily.
Also, as should be clear, I don’t care what people’s politics are. Literature is a separate enquiry from politics or philosophy; the moment we reduce poetry to politics we will be condemned to both read and write dull agit-prop and worse. That, I suspect, is one reason why Obama’s poet was so bad. She was constrained by politics; Kipling manages to rise above it. Here is W. H. Auden on the issue:
I’ve just thought that it might have been workshopped between Obama’s “Sam Seaborn” and Elizabeth Alexander, to hint subliminally that Obama has heard his critics and is moving from being a mere orator to achieve something more prosaic.
Yes – I think you’re right SL, politics ruins a poem. This woman had to be safe, and accordingly, it was a bland poem.
Minatory. What a great word.
Dave, you’re in good form today. Just sayin’.
Can’t say I’ve done any analysis whatsoever, but re ‘and I’m sorry the dog died’ …
I immediately thought of ‘the dog it was that died’ from Oliver Goldsmith’s “An Elegy On The Death Of A Mad Dog”
That would be “something a real poet once wrote” (ref Adrien above)
Now, what mad dog could the poet possibly be referring to ?!?!?!
SL@18 : “good form today”
Actually, I’m just surfacing from a couple of nasty fits over the last couple of days, but then the Ancient Greek tradition was that that was when you became inspired by the gods!
Hmm, interesting pick up, Sweeney. I have been puzzling over the Goldsmith poem, wondering who the original mad dog was intended to be? It was apparently published as a children’s verse with illustrations by Randolph Caldicott.
Dave @ 20 – sorry to hear that – hope you are feeling better now.
A discussion of this topic I’m engaged with elsewhere (on a mailing list) has turned into a conversation about the very best hymns, working by analogy with public poetry — things like ‘Crimond’, ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Rock of Ages’. It seems Aretha (apart from still being able to hit the high ones) got the ‘right’ elements with ‘My Country, tis of thee’.
Ah, no – he’s trashing her because her poetry is pants. One million plus people on the Mall would seem to agree.
Ah but DEM, poetry is not democracy, any more than music is; it’s not Australian Idol we’re talking about here. Perhaps the mistake was Obama’s, in thinking poetry was appropriate for the occasion in this century. But as I’ve said in my own post on the inauguration, I liked the poem (though I agree that it was badly read, poor woman). I thought it had been written carefully with a view to not being too obscure and writing something that could be easily understood in one hearing (not reading). I really liked the way it celebrated ordinary lives; I loved the pointy-ended bit in the middle about black people who slaved to build the edifices and then worked inside them serving and cleaning; for me the hinge of the poem was ‘many have died for this day’ which was not only rhythmic and alliterative but also a bald statement of fact. And I agree with Posey about its other content.
That’s the problem, PC. This poem had to be democracy, even though other poems need not be. Instead we got poorly presented agit-prop. Of course that does assume having a poem is a good idea. Perhaps the days of Kipling — not to mention Horace and Pindar — have gone for all time.
The requirements of democracy (hence politics) are likely antithetical to the production of good literature, unless you are (a) very good and (b) willing to make representative elisions. Kipling had both in his corner.
SL, also, thanks for linking to a decent transcript of the poem; it’s the first properly spaced and properly punctuated one I’ve seen and it’s illuminated a few things for me.
About this — ‘Literature is a separate enquiry from politics or philosophy; the moment we reduce poetry to politics we will be condemned to both read and write dull agit-prop and worse’ — I agree with the second proposition but I don’t think it logically follows the first, with which I disagree. I think they can’t be separated but that the one need not be reduced to the other, though I agree there is too much of the latter in contemporary criticism.
The other thing is that in this thread (this are conservative blog, in which context I are contrarian commenteuse), politics are to some extent driving poetic tastes. Most of you are expressing traditional/authoritarian preferences, not only for very strict form and rhyme (which I also like, it’s just that I don’t think it’s the be-all and end-all) but also for a certain kind of content: most of the examples given on this thread are of imperialist and/or triumphalist verse, though Kipling is a more interesting and intractable case than most.
To revert to the post after this one, I don’t want to argue the toss about it in an uncivil manner, but I don’t think anyone can just say ‘That’s not poetry: this is poetry’ without making a good, detailed case for the point. Accordingly I’m planning my own ‘In Defence of Elizabeth Alexander’ post, if I ever get the time.
Sorry, comments crossed! But the only thing I’d add is to ask which bits you see as agit-prop. Naturally I wouldn’t see them like that: instead I see a lot of the verse quoted here as agit-prop. Which only proves that the Reader Response school of lit crit has something going for it.
I’m afraid that bit made me laugh, which probably wasn’t the intended effect. I got visions of a lifetime of chicken/road jokes. So did everyone I spoke to in the college MCR — average age 30, most between 25-35. Maybe age may have something to do with that particular reaction.
However, as I tried to point out in my last comment, I think even a Les Murray would struggle doing a genuinely democratic poem for this occasion well. When it has to be popular, not agit-prop (which is how I read all of it, alas, as well as WannabeWhitman), but also beautiful and suitable for public recitation — then the order is probably too tall.
This poem failed for me largely based on how it (doesn’t) work when spoken aloud. I am a fair reader of poetry (comes thanks to courtroom theatrics, but I digress), but I could do nothing with it. Even my good improv mate couldn’t make it fly, and she’s brilliant at recitation. Alexander is clearly a very bookish poet, not one used to doing anything like a poetry slam — and the words just die as they leave one’s lips. At first I blamed her for reciting her own poem badly, but then I realised that the poor recitation was a function of the poem, not the speaker. She would probably sound fine doing Recessional.
A couple of us then performed Recessional, and found it extraordinarily moving; it gets better out loud. Adrien’s hat tip to Snoop Dogg and Blackalicious is not entirely out of place here: the very best rap has a resonant respect for the spoken, as opposed to the written, word. And the words in this poem needed to fly.
And we is libertarians around these parts, not conservatives
It would be nice to find out how it was written. Did Alexander have to run it by Obama a couple of times to make sure she got it right, and that the message was completely non-partisan? This is not necessarily fatal to a poem, or to a poetic style, after all – in some poets it might induce blandness, other poets might prove flexible and be able to chop and change, inserting lines here and deleting others there at will. Poets used to working in a variety of mediums (book,stage, screen) would generally be better at this.
The Kipling case is interesting, because I can’t imagine that poem being chopped or changed, but the lines aren’t bland either – the argument exists entirely on a level above politics; it’s a kind of complex moral dialectic that elides partisan political messages at the same time as being at the basis of them. Nice trick if you can pull it off.
Though probably the selection of Elizabeth Alexander as the inaugural poet was wholly symbolic – in the sound bites that follow in the media, very few stations are going to bother focusing on the poem at all, but they will dwell to a certain extent on the back story of Elizabeth Alexander, her personality, etc.
Here is an interview with Elizabeth Alexander with Colbert of DailyShow fame, including classic questions like “What is the difference between a metaphor and a lie?… instead of ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ say ‘You’re hot, let’s do it’”
Great fun.
Posey – You just trash her cos she’s a woman, Adrien.
.
Is that a joke?
If not allow me to introduce Emily:
Maybe it is a joke. But if not think about what such commentary does to the exercise of free speech. Am I to be careful in voicing criticism because male?
DEM – Pants. I forgot ‘pants’. Pants is funny. Reminds me of some Brummy friends of mine who (of course) still owe me $5.
Adrien – sorry. It was a private joke between me and another individual, you in this instance, on a public forum. My bad.
And like all jokes…
SL, great points about the sound of the poem being crucial. Poetry spoken aloud, mutually savoured by both perfomer and (ideally) enraptured audience, must be a non-negotiable component. and measure of a good poem, damn it.
Having said that I am pleased PC liked the poem too and for much the same reasons.
Not mentioned yet was the poem’s clear spiritual content. I agree it was a political poem. All politics has a particular spiritual core.This poem’s political objective was to calm, commiserate, bear witness, acknowledge, praise, warn encourage, uplift. How could it be anything other than a political poem for this occasion.
But it was a spiritual call too: invoking and highlighting the power of the people. Sure America is a vast society but large parts of it are broken and desperate. People are sick to death of all the horror of the past 8 years. Sometimes, as the Sicilian savant, Lampedusa wryly noted, everything must change so it can remain the same.
The poem told the frightened, demoralised, self-doubting people: you are strong, alone and together, you can do and be anything worthwhile doing and being. Do not be afraid. We are side by side. “Pick up your pencils. Begin.” The poem praised human creativity then drew attention to the remarkable creativity and courage of the least celebrated, the darners, labourers and cleaners.
All politics has its spiritual core. But spirituality is a rare commodity or even privately nurtured plant these days and so I think the poem was more theatre and spectacle, than a promise o, to use that debased word, genuine “commitment”.
Though it can be. Pam Ayers is a great chronicler of the absurdities and poignancy of British daily life with no pretension to creating “Great Verse” and people pay to listen to her perform. They don’t evacuate a free recital at speed.
Pam Ayers should be poet laureate. End of.
In fact, there is a case to be made that the best public poets are likely to be the very funny practitioners of various forms of light verse — Gilbert in his lighter moods, Ayers, Murray on his ‘happy days’ (when the Black Dog isn’t lurking).
For some reason I have it in my head that the line about writing free verse being akin to playing tennis without a net is one of hers.
SL, ’twas Robert Frost. (‘Without rules, there is no fun’ or words to that effect.)
The Alexander poem isn’t quite free verse. It may not rhyme but it’s written in fairly tidy tercets, which I now know thanks to LE’s link.
That doesn’t surprise me, it’s the kind of thing he’d say. I heard Ayers say it when I went to see her perform somewhere. She is very good, by the way — highly recommend ‘The Dolly on the Dustcart’ for a nicely done ironic/melancholic bit of British.
I didn’t think Alexander was aiming for true ‘verse libre’, although it does look as though she has just divided prose into tercets, because it doesn’t scan (trochees and anapests inserted fairly randomly, for example). That, however, may be a function of the process TimT has hypothesized.