Hi. I leave today, for a week. When I get back I'll be plunging into
final (hah!) details of planning the 50th anniversary of The Ash Grove,
the club I founded and ran during its 15+ years. One of the workshops
in next April's festival at UCLA is on the poetry of the 60's era,
featuring,
among others, Jack Hirschman, poet laureate of San Francisco, but
known around here as the UCLA prof. who walked out of class and
his job, as a force in beginning the Vietnam moratorium in LA. Jack
was a very popular teacher and obviously is a wonderful poet. Great
art in the service of universal justice spans ages, offering insight and
inspiration to great struggles. May this history carry to today. We need
it.
Enjoy these poets and celebrate the remarkable Annette Rubinstein. A
week's respite from my barrage provides space that great poetry merits.
When things are official, if not ever complete (a good thing,) I'll post
details of the festival events. A guaranteed whopper, much of it free.
See you next Wednesday, and please hold emails, if possible.
Finally, a note of thanks to NYTransfer for so many invaluable postings.
Ed
From: All the News That Doesn't Fit <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [NYTr] NYC: 9/23 Memorial Tribute to Annette Rubinstein
Radical Poets, Ignorant Biographers
by Dr. Annette T. Rubinstein
A memorial tribute to Annette Rubinstein, who died at age 97 on June 20,
2007 will be held on Sunday, September 23, 2007 at the Brecht Forum, 451
West Street, New York City
[This is a talk given at the Brecht Forum in New York City on April 28,
2007, inaugurating the annual Annette T. Rubinstein Lecture on
Literature and Politics.]
---
In 1932 when I first became politically active I was employed by the
newly organized "home relief bureau", the first federal relief agency of
the New Deal. There I met a group of young marxists trying to start what
later became the SCMWA and promptly joined them. One afternoon I told
several of them that I would not be at a meeting that evening because I
had a ticket for a new production of Romeo and Juliet. One of my
comrades said, "What are you going to that for? All he writes about is
kings and queens." I'm afraid I fell into lecture mode, quoting Romeo's
bid for an illegal poison to the poverty stricken apothecary--"The world
is not thy friend nor the world's law; the world affords no law to make
thee rich. Then break it and take this." The poor apothecary accepts the
coins saying, "My poverty, but not my will consents", and Romeo, a
materialist like his creator, says "I pay thy poverty and not thy will."
How many converts I than made I don't know but I realized that I was
responsible to tell my new friends about my old ones. Thereafter I did
that in lectures and classes for the next half century and, when being
black listed gave me time to sit down and write From Shakespeare to
Shaw, I devoted it to showing that the great poets were almost all
actively on our side.
Since, completely omitting all the great radical poets from 19th century
English literature would be to rob it of its glory, conventional
biographies and cultural histories include only their safe work and most
students have no idea of what they were really like. Every high school
graduate knows that Swift was captured by Lilliputians but few college
alumnae know that he is still revered in Ireland for having organized a
boycott of English goods with the slogan, "Burn everything that comes
from England except the coal."; that Milton wrote Paradise Lost but not
that he was Cromwell's Secretary of State, that he proudly announced "We
are the first to have cut off a king's head with the crown still on it";
that Coleridge took opium but not that he dared imprisonment by
attacking the pro-war minister; that Wordsworth wrote about daisies but
not that he wrote about the French Revolution; that Byron created the
legendary lover, Don Juan, but not that he organized a medical corps for
the Greek army fighting for independence; that Shelley wrote about the
Skylark but not about the Peterloo Massacre and that Keats, in his odes
not only spoke of the paradisal world inhabited by the nightingale but
also of the far from idyllic one created by poverty here.
It is to mock this ignorance that a contemporary American versifier,
Dorothy Parker, wrote her well known:
Byron and Shelley and Keats
A trio of lyrical treats:
Byron's fair brow was o'er clustered with curls
And Shelley walked out with a number of girls
And Keats was never descended from earls....
Parker herself has been similarly belied since two biographies and a
film all tell us that she occasionally drank too much and had a number
of love affairs but not that she belonged to over a dozen of the
forbidden organizations on the infamous attorney-general's list, stood
up for Sacco and Vanzetti, helped to organize the Hollywood anti-nazi
league in the early thirties and headed the Spanish Rescue Ship campaign
to save Spanish children orphaned by Franco's bombs.
Wherever it is possible to ignore a great radical writer, conservative
editors and anthologists do so. For example the standard college text
first published in 1904 makes no mention of Blake, nor does he appear in
three subsequent editions. More often however a writer is too well known
to be completely ignored and then the story of his life and work are
distorted. Our first two poets--William Blake and Robert Burns--are so
treated, as the few quotations from their work indicate. In the
subsequent pages we allow Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and
Keats to speak--very briefly--for themselves as they are permitted to do
in no conventional anthology.
**
William Blake 1757 - 1827
Over and over again, in a few unforgettable lines Blake gives us the
essence of the factory system--the "dark satanic mills" which left men
unemployed, killed children, and forced prostitution through the
starvation wages it paid their mothers.
He uses the word "chartered" (monopolized) with the force of a curse or
a blow and puts his finger unerringly on the deliberate employment of
religion to sanctify tyranny and of both to make property power supreme
over human rights.
For example, two poems, "London" and "Holy Thursday," published in his
Songs of Experience in 1794, read unforgettably:
I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban
The mind-forged manacles I hear:
How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.
But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blast the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.
And:
Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land, --
Babes reduced to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?
Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty?
And their sun does never shine,
And their fields are bleak and bare,
And their ways are filled with thorns,
It is eternal winter there.
For where'er the sun does shine,
And where'er the rain does fall,
Babe can never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appal.
Even before his lovely Songs of Innocence (1787-1789) he had already
demanded:
Why should I care for the men of Thames,
And the cheating waters of charter'd streams
Or shrink at the little blasts of fear
That the hireling blows into mine ear?
Tho' born on the cheating banks of Thames ?
Tho? his waters bathed my infant limbs,
The Ohio shall wash his stains from me;
I was born a slave, but I go to be free.
And two years later the Book of Thel contained such lyrics as:
There souls of men are bought and sold,
And milk-fed infancy for gold;
And youth to slaughterhouses led,
And beauty for a bit of bread.
The sword sung on the barren heath
The sickle in the fruitful field:
The sword he sung a song of death
But could not make the sickle yield.
Even his "prophetic books," which he rightly considered oratory rather
than poetry, and which finally would up in an incomprehensible welter of
myth and ethical symbolism, begin with a celebration of The French
Revolution in 1791. It was so forthright a book that the radical printer
Joseph Johnson, publisher of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the
Rights of Women and William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political
Justice, dared to set up only the first volume in type--we have a proof
edition marked "One Shilling"--and never offered even that for sale!
It may surprise many who have heard of Blake only as an unworldly mystic
or visionary to see how unambiguous, direct and specific his political
statements here are. The French Revolution, Book I, begins:
The dead brood over Europe, the cloud and vision descends
over cheerful France;
O cloud well appointed! Sick, sick, the Prince on his couch
wreath'd in dim
And appalling mist, his strong hand outstretched, from his
shoulder down the bond
Runs aching cold into the scepter, too heavy for mortal grasp,
no more
To be swayed by visible hand, nor in cruelty bruise the mild
flourishing mountains.
Later the book continues even more topically:
The American War began; all its dark hours passed before my
face
Across the Atlantic to France; then the French Revolution commenced in
thick clouds--
...the Commons convene in the Halls of the Nation; like
spirits of fire in the beautiful
Porches of the sun?
...The Ancient dawn calls us
To awake from slumber of five thousand years.
**
Robert Burns 1759 ? 1796
As early as 1781 he had written in mockery of England's part in the war
with the colonies:
I murder hate, by field or flood,
Though glory's name may screen us,
In wars at hame I'll spend my blood,
Life-giving wars of Venus.
The deities that I adore,
Are social peace and plenty;
I'm better pleased to make one more
Than be the death o' twenty.
More seriously, a little later when a National Thanksgiving was
proclaimed for a naval victory, he wrote:
Ye hypocrites! are these your pranks,
To murder men, and gie God thanks?
For shame! gie o'er, proceed no further ?
God won't accept your thanks for murther!
Burns had already begun to resent the patronizing admiration of the
genteel; he wrote in a letter in March 22, 1787:
I have the advice of some very judicious friends among the
literati here, but with them I sometimes find it necessary to
claim the privilege of thinking for myself.
He began, ungratefully many thought, to seek his friends among "not very
select society." In the third edition of his poems Burns defiantly
included a new ballad on the American War, and on a trip with a member
of the not very select society--a radical school teacher--he wrote on
the window of an inn in Stirling his famous lines about the House of
Hanover:
An idiot race, to honor lost:
Who know them best, despise them most.
On being reproved, he quickly added his "self-reproof":
Dost not know that old Mansfield, who writes like the Bible,
Says the more 'tis a truth, sir, the more 'tis a libel?
His brother Gilbert later said that
Robert used to remark to me that he could not conceive a
more mortifying picture of human life than a man seeking work.
And Burns himself said in "Man Was Made to Mourn":
See yonder poor, o'erlabored wight,
So abject, mean and vile,
Who begs a brother of the earth
To give him leave to toil....
He described a peasant farmer, worn out by unremitting toil before he
had reached the prime of life:
For, ance that five-and-forty speel'd,
See crazy, weary, joyless eild,
Wi' wrinkled face,
Comes hostin' hirplin', owre the fuekd
Wi' creepin' pace.
A prince can make a belted knight
A marquis, duke an' a' that!
But an honest man's aboon his might ?
Guid faith, he mauna' fa' that!
For a' that, and' a' that,
Their dignities, an' a' that',
The pith o' sense an' pride o' worth
Are higher rank than a' that.
Then let us pray that come it may
(As come it will for a' that)
That Sense and Worth o'er a' the earth
Shall bear the gree an' a' that!
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That man to man the world o'er
Shall brithers be for a' that.
**
William Wordsworth 1770 - 1850
French Revolution
As it appeared to enthusiasts at its commencement
An extract from the long poem of my own poetical education. It was first
published by Coleridge in his "Friend," which is the reason of its
having had a place in every edition of my poems since. (Wordsworth.)
--From The Prelude, Bk. XI
OH! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven! --
Oh! times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,
When most intent on making of herself
A prime Enchantress--to assist the work,
Which then was going forward in her name!
Not favored spots alone, but the whole earth
The beauty wore of promise, that which sets
(As at some moment might not be unfelt
Among the bowers of paradise itself)
The budding rose above the rose full blown.
What temper at the prospect did not wake
To happiness unthought of? The inert
Were roused, and lively natures rapt away!
They who had fed their childhood upon dreams,
The playfellows of fancy, who had made
All powers of swiftness, subtilty, and strength
Their ministers,--who in lordly wise had stirred
Among the grandest objects of the sense,
And dealt with whatsoever they found there
As if they had within some lurking right
To wield it;--they, too, who, of gentle mood,
Had watched all gentle motions, and to these
Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more mild,
And in the region of their peaceful selves;--
Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty
Did both find, helpers to their heart's desire,
And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish;
Were called upon to exercise their skill,
Not in Utopia, subterranean fields
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us,--the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!
1804. (October 26, 1809.)
Lines Written in Early Spring
I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined.
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.
To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.
Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:--
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.
The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think , do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.
If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature's holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?
1798.
After Wordsworth had sought and achieved a government sinecure and
changed his politics to suit, Byron said sharply:
If fallen in evil days on evil tongues,
Milton appeal'd to the Avenger, Time,
If Time, the Avenger, execrates his wrongs,
And makes the word "Miltonic" mean "sublime"
He deign'd not to belie his soul in songs,
Nor turn his very talent to a crime;
He did not loathe the Sire to laud the Son,
But closed the tyrant-hater he begun.
A generation later, Robert Browning mourned:
Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband to stick in his coat--
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,
Lost all the others she lets us devote;
They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver,
So much was theirs who so little allowed:
How all our copper had gone for his service!
Rags--were they purple, his heart had been proud!
We that had loved him so, followed him, honored him,
Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,
Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,
Made him our pattern to live and to die!
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,
Burns, Shelley, were with us,--they watch from their graves!
He alone breaks from the van and the freemen,
He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves!
We shall march prospering,--not thro his presence;
Songs may inspirit us,--not from his lyre;
Deeds will be done,--while he boasts his quiescence,
Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire;
Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,
One task more declined, one more footpath untrod,
One more devil's-triumph and sorrow for angels,
One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!
Life's night begins: let him never come back to us!
There would be doubt, hesitation and pain,
Forced praise on our part--the glimmer of twilight,
Never glad confident morning again!
Shelley wrote more in sorrow than anger:
Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship and love's first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine
Which thou too feel'st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter's midnight roar:
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,--
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.
**
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The lines below indicate Coleridge's realization that the seemingly
superhuman resources of the ruling class overawe the poor only because
they do not see that those impressive resources are simply the sum total
of what has been stolen from each of them. Similarly such a line as the
eleventh illustrates his insight into the human destruction the rulers
achieve in obedience to, rather than in defiance of, their law.
Ah! far removed from all that glads the sense,
>From all that softens or enables Man,
The wretched Many! Bent beneath their loads
They gape at pageant Power, nor recognise
Their cots' transmuted plunder!
. . . . . . . .
...O ye numberless,
Whom foul oppression's ruffian gluttony
Drives from Life's plenteous feast!
. . . . . . . .
O Aged Women! ye who weekly catch
The morsel tossed by law-forced charity,
And die so slowly, that none call it murder!
This year also he wrote the powerful and too little known "War
Ecologue," Fire, Famine and Slaughter. In less than a hundred dramatic
lines it conveys the extraordinary weight of desolation and misery for
which England's war ministry was responsible. The brief dialogue below
gives an idea of its still immature but evident strength.
Famine: Can you guess what I saw there?
Fire & Slaughter: Whisper it, sister! in our ear.
Famine: A baby beat its dying mother:
I had starved the one and was starving the other!
Fire & Slaughter: Who bade you do't?
Famine: The same! the same!
Letters four do form his name. [Pitt]
He let me loose, and cried Halloo!
To him alone the praise is due.
Fire: Sisters! I from Ireland came!
Hedge and corn-fields all on flame,
I triumphed o'er the setting sun!
And all the while the work was done,
On as I strode with my huge strides,
I flung back my head and I held my sides,
It was so rare a piece of fun
To see the sweltered cattle run
With uncouth gallop through the night,
Scared by the red and noisy light!
By the light of his own blazing cot
Was many a naked Rebel shot;
The house-stream met the flame and hissed,
While crash! fell in the roof, I wist
On some of those old bed-rid nurses,
That deal in discontent and curses.
Famine & Slaughter: Who bade you do't?
Fire: The same! The same!
Letters four do form his name.
He let me loose and cried Halloo!
To him alone the praise is due.
**
George Byron 1780 - 1824
However, he was still emotionally much involved in English affairs, as
we can see by the Dedication to his major poem, Don Juan, which he began
to write in 1819.
Bob Southey! You're a poet--Poet Laureate,
And representative of all the race;
Although 'tis true that you turned out a Tory at
Last--yours has lately been a common case;
And now, my Epic Renegade! what are ye at?
With all the Lakers, in and out of place?
A nest of tuneful persons, to my eye
Like "four and twenty Blackbirds in a pye;
"Which pye being opened they began to sing"
(This old song and new simile holds good),
"A dainty dish to set before the King,"
Or Regent, who admires such kind of food;--
And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing,
But like a hawk encumbered with his hood--
Explaining metaphysics to the nation--
I wish he would explain his explanation.
. . . . . . . . .
I would not imitate the petty thought.
Nor coin my self-love to so base a vice.
For all the glory your conversion brought,
Since gold alone should not have been its price,
You have your salary; was't for that you wrought?
And Wordsworth has his place in the Excise,
You're shabby fellows-true--but poets still,
And duly seated on the immortal hill.
. . . . . . . . .
Think'st thou, could he [Milton]--the blind old man arise--
Like Samuel from the grave, to freeze once more
The blood of monarchs with his prophecies,
Or be alive again--again all hoar
With time and trials, and those helpless eyes,
And heartless daughters--worn--and pale--and poor;
Would he adore a sultan? he obey
The intellectual eunuch Castlereagh?
Where shall I turn me not to view new bonds,
For I will never feel them?--Italy!
Thy late reviving Roman soul desponds
Beneath the lie this State-thing breathed o'er thee?
Thy clanking chain, and Erin's yet green wounds,
Have voices--tongues to cry aloud for me.
Europe has slaves, allied, kings, armies, still,
And Southey lives to sing them very ill.
Yet Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying
Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind;
Thy trumpet voice, though broken now and dying,
The loudest still the tempest leaves behind;
Thy tree hath lost its blossoms, and the rind,
Chopp'd by the axe, looks rough and little worth,
But the sap lasts,--and still the seed we find
Sown deep, even in the bosom of the North;
So shall a better spring less bitter fruit bring forth.
That year Byron also paid his ferociously playful compliments to the
Duke of Wellington in the superb ninth canto of Don Juan, with its
profoundly serious and honest conclusions. This unhappy description of
England's postwar foreign policy may perhaps trouble some of us whose
nation has today inherited England's leadership in European affairs.
Though Britain owes (and pays you too) so much,
Yet Europe doubtless owes you greatly more:
You have repaired Legitimacy's crutch,
A prop not quite so certain as before:
The Spanish, and the French, as well as Dutch,
Have seen, and felt, how strongly you restore;
And Waterloo has made the world your debtor
(I wish your bards would sing it rather better).
You are "the best of cut-throats:"--do not start;
The phrase is Shakespeare's and not misapplied:
War's a brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art,
Unless her cause by right be sanctified.
If you have acted once a generous part,
The world, not the world's masters, will decide,
And I shall be delighted to learn who,
Save you and yours, have gain'd by Waterloo?
. . . . . . . . . . .
Call'd "Saviour of the Nations"--not yet saved,
And "Europe's Liberator"--still enslaved.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Alas! could she [England] but fully, truly, know
How her great name is now throughout abhorr'd:
How eager all the earth is for the blow
Which shall lay bare her bosom to the sword;
How all the nations deem her their worst foe,
That worse than worst of foes, the once adored
False friend, who held out freedom to mankind,
And now would chain them to the very mind:--
Would she be proud, or boast herself the free
Who is but first of slaves? The nations are
In prison,-- but the gaoler, what is he?
No less a victim to the bolt and bar.
Is the poor privilege to turn the key
Upon the captive, freedom? He's as far
>From the enjoyment of the earth and air
Who watches o'er the chain as they who wear.
Finally, in the same rich poetic year, Byron wrote a furious satire, The
Age of Bronze, addressed to the contemporary "Cincinnatti" or "patriotic
farmers"--that is, to the landowners, who had profited so richly by more
than twenty years of war, and were so reluctant to submit to peace.
See these inglorious Cincinnatti swarm,
Farmers of war, dictators of the farm;
Their ploughshare was the sword in hireling hands,
Their fields manured by gore of other lands;
Safe in their barns, these Sabine tillers sent
Their brethren out to battle--why? for rent!
Year after year they voted cent per cent,
Blood, sweat, and tear-wrung millions--why? for rent!
They roar'd, they dined, they drank, they swore they meant
To die for England--why then live? for rent!
The peace has made one general malcontent
Of these high-market patriots; war was rent!
Their love of country, millions all misspent,
How reconcile? by reconciling rent!
And will they not repay the treasures lent?
No: down with everything, and up with rent!
Their good, ill, health, wealth, joy, or discontent,
Being, end, aim, religion--rent, rent, rent!
Fifty years after Byron's death the Spanish statesman and revolutionary
leader, Castelar, wrote: "What does Spain not owe to Byron? From his
mouth came our hopes and fears. He has baptized us with his blood. There
is no one with whose being some song of his is not woven. His life is
like a funeral torch over our graves."
In 1891 the Italian critic, Chiarni, said that Byron above all
contributed "to reestablish in the heart of crushed and servile Europe
sentiments of dignity and human liberty."
And in 1947 Nicephonis Vrettakos, a Greek poet of the Resistance, wrote
in his long poem, 33 Days:
And the Lord Byron' student battalion, fighting
in the center of the city recited verses from
the "Curse of Athena" and wondered what could
console the shade of Byron in this world....
And that night Byron was sighing as he sat high up
on the Acropolis over the Saronic Gulf facing England.
And that night Sophocles awakened and Pindar
and Solon and Plato
And they wore the helmets of our dead.
And there appeared squadrons of French soldiers
who had been killed fighting in front of the Bastille.
Russian soldiers who had been killed in snow covered
Petrograd.
Soldiers who had fallen in the university city of Madrid.
Women who had leapd over the cliffs of Zalongo.
And all of them had formed a circle high up on the Acropolis.
And they paid homage.
And they presented arms as they looked at the sun and
saw in its flame the Lord Byron student battalion
marching past.
**
Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792 - 1822
Shelley undertook the private printing of Queen Mab himself, since his
publisher refused to bring the poem out, fearing an almost certain
prosecution. Shelley had written, in a vain attempt to persuade him:
"Indeed, a poem is safe: the iron-souled Attorney general would scarcely
dare to attack." But Hookham evidently knew better, for when, some seven
years later, a pirated edition was publicly printed, its publisher was
promptly arrested.
The poem which was destined to be of such importance in the English
radical movement of the mid-nineteenth century does not yet show
Shelley's mature poetic genius. However, it has considerable literary
merit and gives at least a fragmentary first statement of almost all of
his major political ideas.
The form adopted was the sort of fairy-tale dream already popularized by
Southey and others. The first two cantos dealt with a vision of the
past, the last two dealt with an ideal view of the happy future, while
the five central ones were devoted to a slashing attack on the social
evils of the current time. The third canto showed the evils of monarchy,
the fourth of political tyranny, the fifth of economic exploitation, and
the sixth and seventh, of religion.
The third canto begins with the dreamer Ianthe, guided by Queen Mab,
visiting a King at his court where, in the fairy's words:
Those guided flies
That, basking in the sunshine of a court,
Fatten on its corruption; what are they?--
The drones of the community; they feed
On the mechanic's labor; the starved hind.
For them compels the stubborn glebe to yield
Its unshared harvests; and yon squalid form,
Leaner than fleshless misery, that wastes
A sunless life in the unwholesome mine,
Drags out in labor a protracted death
To glut their grandeur; many faint with toil
That few may know the cares and woe of sloth.
In the next canto, which opens with a description of the death and
destruction during Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, Ianthe exclaims at
how evil human nature must be to cause such desolation. The fairy
sternly replies:
Nature!--no!
Kings, priests and statesmen blast the human flower
Even in its tender bud; their influence darts
Like subtle poison through the bloodless veins
Of desolate society.
In the fifth canto Shelley moves on to a discussion of economic
exploitation and says:
Hence commerce springs, the venal interchange
Of all that human art of Nature yield;
Which wealth should purchase not, but want demand,
And natural kindness hasten to supply
>From the full fountain of its boundless love,
Forever stifled, drained and tainted now.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Commerce has set the mark of selfishness
The signet of its all-enslaving power,
Upon a shining ore, and called it gold;
Before whose image bow the vulgar great,
The vainly rich, the miserable proud,
The mob of peasants, nobles, priests and kings,
And with blind feelings reverence the power
That grinds them to the dust of misery.
But in the temple of their hireling hearts
Gold is a living god and rules in scorn
All earthly things but virtue.
This canto moves on to an extraordinary analysis of the difference
between the wavering, occasional, easily diverted opposition to tyranny
of the middle-class man of good will, and the steady unrelenting hatred
of tyranny felt by those "who have nothing to lose but their chains."
The man of ease, who, by his warm fireside,
To deeds of charitable intercourse
And bare fulfilment of the common laws
Of decency and prejudice confines
The struggling nature of his human heart,
Is duped by their cold sophistry;...
...But the poor man
Whose life is misery, and fear and care;
Whom the morn wakens but to fruitless toil
...he litte heeds
The rhetoric of tyranny, his hate is quenchless as his wrongs;
he laughs to scorn
The vain and bitter mockery of words,
Feeling the horror of the tyrant's deeds,
And unrestrained but by the arm of power,
That knows and dreads his enmity.
However, despite the poor man's deeper understanding, as yet:
The iron rod of penury still compels
Her wretched slave to bow the knew to wealth,
And poison, with unprofitable toil,
A life too void of solace to confirm
The very chains that bind him to his doom.
The sixth and seventh cantos deal with the tyranny of religion and
persecution of atheists, foreshadowing in the hero, Ahasuerus,
opposition to a tyrannical deity, the great theme of Shelley's epic
Prometheus Unbound. In the last two cantos the fairy queen comforts
Ianthe by a glimpse of the happy future when science will have made a
paradise of earth and love will have taught men to enjoy its fruits in
peace.
1819
By the end of September, Shelley had completed his magnificent Mask of
Anarchy and sent it to Leigh Hunt, urging its immediate publication.
Hunt evidently thought it too dangerous and, despite repeated inquiries
and urgings, suppressed the poem, which first appeared in 1832 long
after Shelley?s death. This great work is far too long to quote in full,
but a few of its ninety-one stanzas will give some idea of its force and
quality. Shelley uses "Anarchy" to express the essential nature of a
free enterprise, competitive society. In the Masque lawyers, priests,
kings and bankers crowd to welcome Anarchy as their "Law and God."
I met Murder on the way--
He had a mask like Castlereagh;
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven bloodhounds followed him.
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew,
Which from his wide cloak he drew.
Men of England, heirs of glory,
Heroes of unwritten story,
Nurslings of one mighty mother,
Hopes of her, and one another!
Rise, like lions after slumber,
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fall'n on you:
Ye are many, they are few.
What is freedom? Ye can tell
That which Slavery is too well,
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.
'Tis to work, and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day
In your limbs as in a cell,
For the tyrants' use to dwell:
So that ye for them are made,
Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade;
With or without your own will, bent
To their defense and nourishment.
This is slavery--savage men,
Or wild beasts within a den,
Would endure not as ye do:
But such ills they never knew.
What art thou, Freedom? O, could slaves
Answer from their living graves
This demand, tyrants would flee
Like a dream's dim imagery.
Thou art not, as imposter say,
A shadow soon to pass away,
A superstition and a name
Echoing from the cave of Fame.
For the labourer thou art bred
And a comely table spread,
From his daily labour come,
In a neat and happy home.
Thou art clothes, and fire, and food
For the trampled multitude:
No--in countries that are free
Such starvation cannot be,
As in England now we see.
On Shelley's centennial, there were two celebrations, one at his old
school and one in London.
Shaw accepted the latter invitation but since that meeting was to be
held in the evening when working men were free, he first attended a part
of the suburban celebration and heard Shelley described, as he himself
later reported, as "so fragile, so irresponsible, so ethereally tender,
so passionate a creature that the wonder was that he was not a much
greater rascal." He left before the end of the ceremonies to reach the
meeting at the Hall of Science in London which, as he said, "consisted
for the most part of working men who took Shelley quite seriously and
were much more conscious of his opinions and his spirit than his
dexterity as a versifier."
A few weeks later Shaw wrote an article for the Albemarle Review about
Shelley. In this he described both meetings and said, of the latter:
"Finally, Mr. Foote recited Men of England, which brought the meeting to
an end amid thunders of applause. What would have happened had anyone
recited it at Horsham is more than I can guess. Possibly the police
would have been sent for...I think no reasonable man can deny the right
of those who refuse to allow the present occasion to be monopolized by
triflers to whom he was nothing more than a word jeweler."
In another part of the same article Shaw points out that:
"In Politics Shelley was a Republican, a Leveller, a Radical of the most
extreme type. He was even an Anarchist of the old-fashioned Godwinian
school, up to the point at which he perceived Anarchism to be
impracticable. He publicly ranged himself with demagogues and gaol-birds
like Cobbett and Henry Hunt and not only advocated the Plan of Radical
Reform which was afterwards embodied in the proposals of the Chartists,
but denounced the rent-roll of the landed aristocracy as the true
pension list, thereby classing himself as what we now call a Land
Nationalizer. He echoed Cobbetts attack on the National Debt and the
Funding System in such a manner as to leave no reasonable doubt that if
he had been born half a century later he would have been advocating
Social Democracy with a view to its development into the most democratic
form of Communism practically attainable and maintainable."
**
John Keats 1785 - 1821
In one of his poems written in 1816, Keats, then twenty-one, said:
O for ten year that I may overwhelm
Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed
That my own soul has to itself decreed.
. . . . . . . .
...First the realm I'll pass
Of Flora, and old Pan: sleep in the grass,
Feed upon apples red, and strawberries,
And choose each pleasure that my fancy sees;
Catch the white handed nymphs in shady places,
To woo sweet kisses from averted faces....
. . . . . . . . .
And can I ever bid these joys farewell?
Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,
Where I may find the agonies, the strife
Of human hearts....
After less than half those ten years had been granted, his final illness
put an end to writing. It interrupted him in the middle of a long
unfinished poem, The Fall of Hyperion, where the poet venturing into a
fantastic and perilous dream finds sanctuary near a mysterious alter and
asks the attendant Spirit why he alone is thus saved:
"None can usurp this height," returned the shade
"But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.
All else who find a haven in the world;
Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days,
If by a chance into this fane they cone,
Rot on the pavement where thou rotted'st half"--
"Are there not thousands in the world" said I,
"Who love their fellow even to the death;
Who feel the giant agony of the world;
And more, like slaves to poor humanity,
Labour for mortal good? I sure should see
Other men here, but I am here alone."
"Those whom thou speak'st of are no visionaries."
Rejoined that voice,--"they are no dreamers weak;
They seek no wonder but the human face,
No music but a happy-noted voice--
They come not here, they have no thought to come--
And thou art here, for thou art less than they."
In the Prologue to Endymion, he gives us a brief, pregnant statement of
those conditions against which "a thing of beauty" may serve as a
talisman:
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching; yes, in spite of all
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits...
Just as brilliant are the close-packed concrete images in "Ode to A
Nightingale," such as:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird,
No hungry generations tread thee down
and:
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,--
There are also the three amazing stanzas in the long narrative poem of
"Isabella; or The Pot of Basil" which--but we must let Bernard Shaw
describe them, though perhaps he somewhat overstated the case to shock
the memorial committee that had asked him for a contribution to the 1921
Keats Centennial volume. In his contribution Shaw said, in part:
"Keats achieved the very curious feat of writing one poem of which it ma
be said that if Karl Marx can be imagined as writing a poem instead of a
treatise on Capital, he would have written Isabella. The immense
indictment of the profiteers and exploiters with which Marx has shaken
capitalistic civilization to its foundations, even to its overthrow in
Russia, is epitomized in":
With her tow brothers this fair lady dwelt
Enriched from ancestral merchandise,
And for them many a weary hand did swelt
In torched mines and noisy factories,
And may once proud-quiver'd loins did melt
In blood from stinging whip;--with hollow eyes
Many all day in dazzling river stood,
To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood.
For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,
And went all naked to the hungry shark;
For them his ears gush'd blood; for them in death
The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark
Lay full of darts; for them alone did seethe
A thousand men in troubles wide and dark:
Half-ignorant, they turn'd an easy wheel
That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel.
Why where they proud? Because their marble founts
Gush'd with more pride than do a wretch's tears?--
Why were they proud? Because fair orange-mounts
Were of more soft ascent that lazar stairs?--
Why were they proud? Because red-lin'd accounts
Were richer than the songs of Grecian years?--
Why were they proud? Again we ask aloud,
Why in the name of Glory were they proud?
Everything that the Bolshevik means and feels when he uses the fatal
epithet "bourgeois" is expressed forcibly, completely; and beautifully
in those three stanzas, written half a century before the huge tide of
middle-class commercial optimism and complacency began to ebb in the
wake of the planet Marx. Nothing could well be more literary than the
wording: it is positively euphuistic. But it contains all the Factory
Commission Reports that Marx read, and that Keats did not read because
they were not yet written in his time. And so Keats is among the
prophets with Shelley, and had he lived, would no doubt have come down
from Hyperion and Endymion to tin tacks as a very full blooded modern
revolutionist.
Brecht Forum
New York City
April 28, 2007
*****
Travel Directions
The Brecht Forum is at 451 West Street (West Side Highway) in Manhattan,
between Bank and Bethune Streets, 1-1/2 blocks north of West 11 Street.
IND Eighth Avenue A, C, or E train to 14 Street or BMT Canarsie L train
to 8 Avenue (take a few minutes to look at "Life Underground", Tom
Otterness' series of whimsical bronze sculptures scattered throughout
both sections of the station); walk down 8 Avenue to Bank Street, turn
right, walk west to West Street, turn right.
IRT Seventh Avenue 1, 2, or 3 train to 14 Street; get off at south end
of station, walk west on 12 Street to 8 Avenue, left to Bank Street,
turn right, walk west to West Street, turn right.
New Jersey PATH train to Christopher Street; walk north on Greenwich
Street to Bank Street, left to West Street, turn right.
#8 bus to West Street; walk up West Street to 451.
#11, #14A or #20 bus to Abingdon Square; walk west on Bank Street to
West Street, turn right.
#14D bus to 8 Avenue and 14 Street, walk down 8 Avenue to Bank Street,
turn right, walk west to West Street, turn right.
===
The Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory (TOPLAB)
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.toplab.org
"My fellow Americans, major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the
battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."
--George W. Bush, May 1, 2003
"...I told the American people that the road ahead would be difficult,
and that we would prevail. Well, it has been difficult--and we are
prevailing."
--George W. Bush, June 28, 2005
"Our cause in Iraq is noble and necessary....America is engaged in a new
struggle that will set the course for a new century. We can and we will
prevail."
--George W. Bush, January 10,
2007
"Prevailing in Iraq is not going to be easy."
--George W. Bush, March 19, 2007
"[My son] Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be
the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next
few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human
lives." --Cindy Sheehan, May 28, 2007
+U.S. military fatalities through May 1, 2003: 140
+U.S. military fatalities through June 28, 2005: 1743
+U.S. military fatalities through January 10, 2007: 3017
+U.S. military fatalities through March 19, 2007: 3217
+U.S. military fatalities as of September 22, 2007: 3795 (this figure
exceeds the number of people killed in all of the incidents that
occurred on September 11, 2001)
+Iraqi civilian fatalities through May 1, 2003: 1982
+Iraqi civilian fatalities through June 28, 2005 (estimated by
IraqBodyCount.net): 22,563 ? 25,560*
+Iraqi civilian fatalities through January 10, 2007 (estimated by
IraqBodyCount.net): 53,101 ? 58,704*
+Iraqi civilian fatalities through March 19, 2007 (estimated by
IraqBodyCount.net): 59,326 ? 65,160*
+Iraqi civilian fatalities as of September 22, 2007 (estimated by
IraqBodyCount.net): 73,390 ? 79,999*
+Iraqi civilian fatalities as of July 2006 (estimated by The Lancet):
654,965
*These figures are based on the number of fatalities cited in various
news reports and have been criticized, with much justification, for not
giving an accurate assessment of the real civilian death count. A much
more rigorous and statistically-reliable study, conducted by teams from
Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and Al-Mustansiriya
University, and published in The Lancet (the British medical journal)
in the Fall of 2004, put the figure at around 100,000 civilians dead.
However, that data had been based on "conservative assumptions",
according to research team leader Les Roberts, and the actual count at
that time was credibly assumed to be significantly higher. For example,
The Lancet study's data greatly underestimated fatalities in Fallujah
due to the surveying problems encountered there at that time. Most
recently, a second Lancet study, released on October 10, 2006, now
indicates that 654,965 "excess" deaths of Iraqi civilians have occurred
since the outbreak of the aggression and genocide committed by the
United States against the people of Iraq.
Sources: http://www.iraqbodycount.net/
http://icasualties.org/oif/
http://www.zmag.org/lancet.pdf
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1338749,00.html
http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/Iraq_war.html
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php4?article_id=6271
http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20041025/008279.html
http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf
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