Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

What Television Shows

Anthony Esolen — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:02:25 GMT

Dear Friends — for our week on the meaning of show, I give you an audio of an article I wrote a couple of years ago, on what the archaeologist in me discovered when Debra put in my Christmas stocking a copy of the TV Guide from 1957. This, I think, is one of the most startling things I’ve ever written about American life. It’s also an article you can profit from even a few minutes of, because what I saw in that record of one week of television, two years before I was born, says more about America at that time than many a tome of historical or political analysis. I meet it not only with wistfulness but with hope, because what was, in human life, can be again, if not in outward form, yet in its spirit and essence. Every moment is a fork in the road, and the acceptable time is always now!

The text of this week’s podcast appeared in Touchstone Magazine (2021)

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The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)

Anthony Esolen — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:02:04 GMT

I’ve been talking this week about putting on a show, and I’ve mentioned the moral hazard you run when putting on a show becomes your way of life. Yet there are, I think, three ways to look on it, because there are three objects or persons involved. You can make it all about yourself, the actor — or the politician, desiring to be admired. You can make it all about the audience, desiring above all to please them in any way you can, and there can be something innocent and generous about that desire. Or you can make it all about the excellence of the work of art itself: because it is beautiful or noble, because it gives due honor to the good, because it tells the truth in a powerful and memorable way.

All that said, what on earth shall we make of the circus, the focus of our Film of the Week, The Greatest Show on Earth? The circus seems to have died out, or nearly so, partly because they don’t do animal acts anymore, since people have learned too much about what it took to get the big cats and the elephants to do their stunts. Dogs, seals, otters, and other animals that love to play can be taught to do innumerable things by kindness and rewards and the sheer fun of it, so I don’t know that we had to lose all such acts. Partly, though, it was the television that kept people indoors too much, though the effect of it took several decades to accumulate. When I was a boy, not the circus but a traveling carnival came through our valley every year, hitting town after town, and children would go there at night without their parents, to ride the crazy rides, play the games, eat popcorn, talk to other kids, go through the fun house, and on the last night of all, see the fireworks. Those too seem to have disappeared, though you still see them, I believe, at late summer fairs in rural America. We also still had amusement parks then, local parks, some pretty big, some small, some for little children, some for the older kids mostly and for young people on a date. Most of these were owned and operated as family businesses. They had indoor arcades, too, where you could play skee-ball and ring-toss, or shoot pellet guns at mechanical ducks, and so on. One of them, about 20 miles away, was at a lake, so you could go swimming too, and grill hot dogs and hamburgers on an outdoor grill, and spend the whole day, having innocent fun.

So when I watch The Greatest Show on Earth, I think of a kind of life that isn’t to be had anymore, and I wonder also what kinds of people made it so that when this film was awarded the Oscar for Best Picture, beating out High Noon, The Quiet Man, and Singin' in the Rain, the last of which didn’t even get a nomination, there was wild applause in the audience, and everybody in the country, except for a few critics, was delighted to hear about it. If you expect from The Greatest Show on Earth a morality play, or the result of investigation of the circus’s underbelly, you should go elsewhere. The director, Cecil B. DeMille, obviously admires the circus and the clever, daring, energetic, and self-sacrificing performers, carpenters, groundskeepers, machinists, costumers, and sheer grunts that make it possible. That we do see, as the film sometimes shifts, comfortably, into the mode of documentary. And it’s not a put-on. The film is stocked full of famous circus performers, including the man often named as the greatest clown of all time, the sad-face Emmitt Kelly, and the little-boy sized Cucciolo, a spectacular equestrian and elephant rider. And the actor and actress who do trapeze acts, Betty Hutton and Cornel Wilde, performed a lot of the stunts themselves — Hutton more than Wilde, as she was a real trooper. The story of her life is quite moving, and I’ll tell it some day, for sure.

That’s not to say that the film is all spectacle. There are three interwoven stories. One involves a man who has become a clown, Buttons, as he is a former doctor running from the law (Jimmy Stewart). Buttons wears his makeup at all times. Then we have the chief of the circus, Brad Braden (Charlton Heston), who has “sawdust in his veins” when the show is in question. He’s twisted the arms of the financiers to let the show run a full tour rather than hit only the large cities, but that’s because he’s enlisted the most renowned high-wire act of the day, a smooth-talking woman-loving peacock-proud fellow named Sebastian (Cornel Wilde). But that means he’s got to have the center ring, displacing the beautiful Holly (Betty Hutton), who is in love with Brad and who then enters into a generally friendly but very dangerous competition with Sebastian — in acts performed without a net. Complicating things further, the two appear to fall in love. But the scene-stealer in this film is Angel (Gloria Grahame), who was once one of Sebastian’s conquests, who could love Brad, and yet — Sebastian has returned. Add in Dorothy Lamour in an important comic role, and the narrative voice of Edmond O’Brien — an actor who had as much talent and intelligence as the best that America ever produced.

Stephen Spielberg said that this was the first film he ever saw in a theater, and that it influenced him deeply, or rather a stunning scene involving a train wreck did the trick. The film was meant to be seen on a wide screen, and by people who had experience of the circus, which was, in the America of that time, almost everybody. Watch it for what it is, and for certain features of an America that was.

Above is an official trailer for our Film of the Week.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!

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A king tells his son how to make a good show of himself ...

Anthony Esolen — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 12:02:04 GMT

The other day, when I was discussing our Word of the Week, show, I mentioned that when Jesus was talking about hypocrites, he didn’t simply mean that they said one thing and did another. He told his disciples not to blow a trumpet before them when they gave alms so that everybody could see them doing something good. In that case, the hypocrite does what he says, and with fanfare, to be seen doing it. And in fact the Greek source of our word hypocrite did not, in the first instance, imply deceit. It was the word for an actor on stage. If you’re doing your good deed to be seen or to win the praise of men, you’ve put yourself on a public stage, and even though you are doing what you said you would, or what you always do, there’s still something false about you. Maybe that explains why the more sober and traditional Romans so long resisted the introduction of Greek theater into the city, and why actors were long held in low esteem. By the time of Cicero, though, the actor Roscius was one one of the richest and most renowned men in the city, and in fact Cicero’s own good friend, too. Cicero did have something of the ham about him.

Breeze past the next 1600 years, to the lifetime of Shakespeare. Two great streams of drama have united to produce the most brilliant flourishing of plays since ancient Greece, and I believe the most brilliant, ever. One of the streams was Christian, popular, vigorous, and visually daring. It sprang up from the rollicking “mystery” plays (here “mystery” means “craft, artisanship,” because the plays were performed in cycles that took up one or two days, and each craftsman’s guild would be responsible for one play — say, the carpenters for the Noah play, and maybe the fullers or weavers for the Shepherds’ play). Shakespeare, when he was a boy, heard such plays and profited by them, though he pokes gentle fun at them, since they were usually performed by amateurs or even your neighbors, not professionals. It’s what he’s thinking about when Hamlet criticizes actors who go overboard with noise and wild gestures on stage — such an actor, he says, “out-herods Herod.” That’s one stream. The second was the mighty river of classical learning that characterized the Renaissance. The popular and the learned meet, and we get, in England, the profoundly Christian playwright Shakespeare — but also, in Shakespeare, not only a playwright, but an actor, a director, and the manager of his own theater company. He had to think about the art of acting, both its glory and its peril.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that Shakespeare the actor and playwright should be keen-sighted when it comes to another kind of actor and playwright, namely the politician. The danger in political life might be put in this way. The able politician must be aware of how he is seen by his people. He must manage his appearances. This need not involve deceit. It may well involve misdirection, though — when you deliberately set up certain worthy expectations, but then fulfill them in a surprising and unexpected way, much to the cheers of the crowds; or, more dicey, when you set up certain unhappy expectations, and then show, in some public way, that you are not at all the scoundrel or idiot the people thought. You become your own playwright, director, and actor, and the public is your audience. Does that mean you must be a hypocrite, too, as Jesus uses the word? An uncomfortable question, to be sure.

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Here’s the situation Shakespeare gives us in Henry IV, part one. King Henry has only a tenuous claim to the throne. He maneuvered Richard II into abdicating in his favor. Then, Richard, under house arrest at Pomfret Castle, was assassinated, and whether it was by Henry’s orders (which he denied), no one knows. Henry cannot afford to take risks with his image, as Richard did by his careless and too public lifestyle. But his eldest son, Prince Hal, who will become the much admired Henry V, seems utterly careless of his duties and of his image in the people’s eyes. He’s been hanging around with the roguish and cowardly knight Sir John Falstaff, and such riffraff. But that is all part of Hal’s strategy. He knows exactly what he is doing, and he has said so, alone, to the audience. But the King doesn’t know that. So in our speech today, Henry begs Hal to be more chary of his appearances. The point is not that Hal shouldn’t make any show of himself, but that he should make the right kind of show, to secure his power when he inherits the throne. And we needn’t think of this as purely selfish. A nation suffers under a weak king. Think of the disastrous and villainous King John.

Here, then, is Henry’s appeal to Hal. I’ve shortened it by omitting about thirty lines from the middle. It is the appeal of a man with an uneasy conscience and an insecure throne, to a son whom he does not really know. And he really does weep at the end of it. He needn’t have, as it will turn out.

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“Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Prince Hal.” Downes. Public Domain..

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Had I so lavish of my presence been,
So common-hackneyed in the eyes of men,
So stale and cheap to vulgar company,
Opinion, that did help me to the crown,
Had still kept loyal to possession
And left me in reputeless banishment,
A fellow of no mark nor likelihood.
By being seldom seen, I could not stir
But like a comet I was wondered at,
That men would tell their children, "This is he!"
Others would say, "Where? Which is Bolingbroke?"
And then I stole all courtesy from heaven,
And dressed myself in such humility
That I did pluck allegiance from men's hearts,
Loud shouts and salutations from their mouths
Even in the presence of the crowned king.
Thus did I keep my person fresh and new,
My presence, like a robe pontifical,
Ne'er seen but wondered at; and so my state,
Seldom but sumptuous, showed like a feast
And won by rareness such solemnity.
The skipping king, he ambled up and down
With shallow jesters and rash bavin wits,
Soon kindled and soon burnt; carded his state,
Mingled his royalty with capering fools . . . 

And in that very line, Harry, standest thou;
For thou hast lost thy princely privilege
With vile participation.  Not an eye
But is aweary of thy common sight,
Save mine, which hath desired to see thee more;
Which now doth that I would not have it do -- 
Make blind itself with foolish tenderness.

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Eternal Light, Eternal Light!

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:02:56 GMT

When the prophet Isaiah was shown the Holy One and the six-winged angels about his throne, veiling their faces and crying out, “Holy, holy, holy!” he thought he was a dead man, because it was as the Lord said to Moses, “No man can see my face and live.” And yet the Psalmist cries, “Show us, O Lord, thy mercy, and grant us thy salvation.” You might say, “All that means is that we want the Lord to be merciful to us.” Ah, not so fast. The Hebrew verb there is the causative form of the verb to see, so that what he’s asking is that the Lord will cause him to see his mercy. And elsewhere, in one of the most glorious psalms attributed to David, the Lord gives this command: “Seek my face,” to which David replies, “Thy face, Lord, will I seek.” I find this to be all the more powerful, in that the Hebrews were forbidden to make any images of God. Everybody else around them had images of their gods to gawk at or to cower in front of, but the Hebrews did not, and for all that people chatter about “anthropomorphism” in the Old Testament vision of God, there really is almost none of it, only such as is necessary to make it possible to say anything at all about Him. You could squeeze all the anthropomorphism from the entire Old Testament and it wouldn’t fill up a single Homeric hymn to Zeus.

The most pious Greek could look at statues of Zeus and Athena all day long, but he never strove to see them in person — what would have been the point? But God, whom man cannot see, who is “hidden in inaccessible light,” calls upon us to search for him. How can that happen? “Show us the Father,” says Philip to Jesus, and Jesus, perhaps with a sigh and a shake of the head, asks Philip how long he’s been with him and still he doesn’t understand — if you look upon Jesus, you see the Father through him. Milton says so, not only about human beings, but about the angels themselves. Even when the Father shades the full blaze of his glory, the brightest of the seraphim “approach not, but with both wings veil their eyes,” yet through the Son, whose countenance looks forth upon them, they can see the Almighty, “whom else no creature can behold.” And that is the inspiration for our Hymn of the Week, “Eternal Light, Eternal Light,” by Thomas Binney, a British congregationalist minister. Binney was called “The Apostle of Nonconformity” for his striving to disestablish the Anglican Church; he was also one of the most tireless fighters for the abolition of slavery wherever the institution still existed.

You might expect Binney’s hymn, then, to be all about social matters, and he certainly did write about those, but ours today instead is about how God can show himself to man — to mortal man, living in a fallen world, man with dim eyes and a double heart. Yet even if we were as innocent as Adam and Eve before they ate the forbidden fruit, how could we bear the full weight of God’s glory? We’re creatures, not the Creator. We live in time, not above time in eternity. We can hardly think of more than one thing at a time, but God views all things at one view. Nor does God wish to force himself upon us. Love does not compel. “Freely we serve,” says Milton’s Raphael to Adam, “because we freely love.”

Love is the key — the love of Jesus, the face of Jesus. “Where there is love, there is an eye,” said the mystic Richard of St. Victor, a pure soul if there ever was one. It isn’t just that we see what is good and beautiful, and fall in love with it. It is also that unless we love, we will not see. Love opens the eyes. So we can imagine Jesus looking on Philip not only with a touch of perfectly understandable disappointment, but also with love for his simplicity and his open heart. And that is what this hymn is all about.

There are four main melodies for the hymn. Two of them — they are not the same — are called Eternal Light, composed specifically for it. They are not as common as Newcastle, composed by an otherwise unknown organist named Henry L. Morley, who perhaps gave the melody its name in honor of Reverend Binney, who was born at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. (It may be that Henry Morley was a brother or cousin of the notable member of Parliament, Samuel Morley, one of Gladstone’s most important assistants, and a member also of Binney’s congregation in London.) But my favorite melody for the hymn is REPTON, a beautiful and meditative melody we’ve featured here, for Whittier’s hymn Dear Lord and Father of Mankind.

Today’s hymn, set to the tune Newcastle, is sung by the congregation of the Tabernacle Church, in Cardiff, Wales. Click below to listen.

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Eternal Light! eternal Light!
How pure that soul must be,
When, placed within thy searching sight,
It shrinks not, but with calm delight
Can live, and look on thee.

The spirits that surround thy throne
May bear the burning bliss,
But that is surely theirs alone,
Since they have never, never known
A fallen world like this.

O how shall I, whose native sphere
Is dark, whose mind is dim,
Before the Ineffable appear,
And on my naked spirit bear
The uncreated beam?

There is a way for man to rise
To that sublime abode:
An offering and a sacrifice,
A Holy Spirit's energies,
An Advocate with God:

These, these prepare us for the sight
Of holiness above:
The sons of ignorance and night
May dwell in the eternal Light,
Through the eternal Love!

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SHOW

Anthony Esolen — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:04:04 GMT

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“Don’t make a show of yourself!” you may have heard one of your parents say when you were a kid, and you understood it right away, but if you think about it, show, our Word of the Week, is a tricky little word, and it’s a tribute to human intelligence that we don’t need a computer to tell us in what direction to take it. What I mean is this: show means either that you show something, with all the action on your part, or that somebody else is looking at you, regardless of whether you intend it. It’s like the word look: John can have a look in his eye, meaning that John is the one who’s looking, or Bob can say, “John sure has a funny look about him,” or even John’s car can have a funny look, and there it’s John or his car that we’re looking at. Maybe Sally hears about John’s car, and says, “That old Edsel is a steal!” meaning not that the Edsel stole John, but that John “stole” the Edsel by paying for it two bucks and a pack of baseball cards. And when we hear sentences like these, even, as I say, when we’re just little children, we don’t reason about them step by step. We know straight off what they mean. We see it. And there’s another one — sight! “What sharp sight,” you might have said about me when I was young, because I had 20-10 vision in my left eye, and 20-15 in my right, so that I often would read, upside-down, the newspaper my father was reading across from me at the breakfast table, and I’m not just talking about the headlines. But “What a sight!” you might have said that same day, if you saw me coming home from a ballgame, drenched with sweat, and with dirt stains on my knees and the seat of my pants. One meaning is active: I’m seeing. The other is passive: I’m being seen. Same word, opposite directions.

But why shouldn’t we make shows of ourselves? What’s wrong with being an actor? In ancient Greece, the land where western drama was invented, playwrights and actors were held in high regard. That’s because the drama wasn’t for idle entertainment. If you were in Athens in the year 401 B.C. for the great feast in honor of Dionysus, you might have gone to the vast outdoor amphitheater to see the play Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles’ final play, staged posthumously by his grandson, also named Sophocles. It was part of the most important civic and religious festival in Athens, and if you were a foreign dignitary, you’d get a good seat, next to the greatest men in the city, and the sons of Athenian veterans who had died in the previous year. The actors had to play their parts by using the voice and a quite limited range of bodily actions and gestures — they held masks in front of their faces to let everybody know who was who. There couldn’t be any scene-stealing, not really, and the particular personality of the actor was not in play.

But as soon as you’re on stage now, you’re aware that everybody is looking at you, and that’s a temptation. We’ve seen actors hamming it up, right? And actors can be remarkably touchy about being seen to their best effect. I remember here a story I read once about the elegant and highly temperamental actress Tallulah Bankhead, who did most of her work on stage rather than before the camera. A young actress in a play had “upstaged” her, and Tallulah was furious. “Dahling,” she said, with her Southern drawl, and her cigarette-voice sinking below alto, “I can upstage you without even being on the boards.” The young actress was a snip, so she just laughed. But the next night, just before the snip’s big scene, Tallulah was on stage drinking a glass of water, and before she exited, stage right, she pointledly set the glass, not empty, right on the edge of the table, half on, half off, dangerously balanced. The audience saw it, and murmured, and couldn’t take their eyes off it, and — that actress never upstaged Tallulah again!

People like shows — we had a couple of parades every year when I was a kid, and the high school’s marching band always came out on the field for halftime. My town, Archbald, Pennsylvania, was incorporated in 1876, so that our centennial coincided with the nation’s bicentennial, so we had a big parade that hundreds and hundreds of our townsmen took part in, dressing up in garb fit for 1876, and the men even grew beards for it — the first and only time I ever saw my father with one, which he soon shaved off, but some of the other dads liked what they saw, or their wives did, so they kept their beards. At about the same time, the town next to ours resumed a parade called the Race of the Saints, which the Italians there adopted from their original town in the old country, Gubbio. It’s a yearly race in which three teams of men, dressed in colorful traditional garb, race up and down the steep hills of the town, carrying huge platforms and statues of the three competing saints, San Antonio, San Giorgio, and Sant’ Ubaldo, a bishop of Gubbio and patron saint of the town. The “saints” each weighed about 700 pounds. Everybody lined the streets, cheering for their own neighborhood and saint, and of course there was food all day long and music. That was quite a show — but again, it wasn’t as if any of the racers was on a stage to be gawked at and admired all by himself.

P. T. Barnum boasted that he put on The Greatest Show on Earth, and he was in fact a brilliant showman and impresario. We had circuses and carnivals making their way through our valley too, big and small as the case might be, and that was all a kind of descendant from what Barnum did. But Barnum wasn’t just all about trapeze artists and elephants and clowns. It was Barnum who brought the beautiful Jenny Lind, a pure soul indeed, gentle and devout, to America, to feature her in theaters across the land, and Americans took her to their hearts. Which reminds me of another anecdote, one that I read in one of my old issues of The Century Magazine. Jenny was at an inn in Rochester, New York, and six Onondaga chiefs had asked her to sing for them in private. So on a day they showed up, and she sang Swedish folk songs, which they listened to in appreciative and approving silence, then took their solemn leave, fully satisfied.

I think that one of the most serious temptations in life is to make yourself into a show. That’s what Jesus warns against when he speaks of hypocrisy. Think of that marvelous image, of Pharisees blowing a trumpet before them when they give alms, and try to explain to a Roman emperor or any politician anywhere and at any time that he shouldn’t do that, and they’d look at you as if you didn’t understand the simplest of things. What’s the good in being a public benefactor if the public doesn’t get to know about it? We might also ask why everybody in our time is urged to show themselves, to make a show of themselves, to reduce themselves to their appearances. Ah, but the more you show yourself in that way, intending to be seen, the less there is of a real self to show. All smoke and mirrors!

Sketch by John Mahaffey, for the Religious Tract Society, 1890

"The Way We Were"

Sat, 30 May 2026 12:03:02 GMT

I have done many a patriotic tune over the past four years at Word & Song, but since long-weekends now determine when we celebrate civic holidays, we’ve devoted a week to “memorials,” and so that party is over — for a bit. (I’ll come back with a 21-gun salute for the nation’s upcoming 250th birthday and likewise the 4th “birthday” of Word & Song in a few weeks). For this last day of May, then, let me shift the works to a related word, memories, and to a song that that revitalized the singing career of Barbra Streisand and became her first-ever #1 hit song and the signature song that she would sing at every performance for the rest of her career. Barbra came out of retirement for this year’s Academy Awards to sing this song in memory of actor Robert Redford, her co-star in the film of the same name.

When I say that “The Way We Were” revitalized Barbra Streisand’s career, I don’t mean that she was in professional slump at the time she recorded it, by any means. But her early hits — with songs such as “On a Clear Day,” “People,” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade” — were slowly losing out to the surging popularity of rock ’n’ roll. Fortunately for everyone, Barbra had made a firm decision to accept lower royalties for her musical recordings in exchange for absolute control of what pieces she performed. Most recording companies would have balked at such an arrangement, because if they had a hot property, they were looking to make money, and make it big from that “star.” Barbra didn’t care about that, and because she had retained the rights to choose her own projects, she was able to continue doing her beloved show music throughout her career, without pressure from her studio (Columbia Records) to do more “relevant” songs. By the late 1960’s Barbra was directing most of her attention to Broadway and to film roles. Instead of focusing on single hits, she simply continued churning out successful album after succesful album of songs which she wanted to record … while the rock beat went on around her. And for a brief few years, her sales declined, but her star continued to rise.

And this brings us to 1973, when Barbra was performing the female lead in the film “The Way We Were” (released in January, 1974). That film, of course, was definitely not a musical, but having Barbra Streisand under contract was too good an opportunity for anyone to miss. Columbia Pictures called in Marvin Hamlisch to compose twelve songs which would form the centerpiece of the film, including a theme song to be sung by Barbra as a lead part of the musical score. Barbra had known Hamlisch as well as his lyricists, Alan and Marilyn Bergman, from Broadway.

As she had done with Columbia Records, Barbra retained that control over all the music she performed, even in films, and so she asked Hamlisch to write her a theme song in a minor key, to set a melancholic tone for the film’s story of a love that got away. A minor key? Of course. However, when Hamlisch handed over the music, he’d written it in a major key, but he kept in mind Barbra and her singing style and range, the lyrics, and mood of nostalgia and regret that the screenplay required. It worked, and with Barbra adding her inimitable talent, how could it have failed? So Barbra conceded the key, but she did have one tremendous suggestion about the lyrics, and once you hear it, you can’t un-hear it. The original lyrics began, “Daydreams light the corners of my mind.” “Daydreams?” Barbra objected, and so she should have. That was entirely the wrong word. She wanted “memories.” Alan and Marilyn objected on a technicality: that “memories” had three syllables. But of course, it has two the way most people often say the word: mem’ries. (Try swapping out the word “daydreams” for “memories,” to see how off that sounds in this song.) The point was made. That case was closed. And the song — after 33 takes — was in the can.

You might be surprised to hear that test audiences who watched the film’s pre-release showings didn’t care much for the song, so the the studio decided to ditch it for the film. But they did release it in September of 1973 as a single — as part of publicity campaign for the forthcoming film release. And they were that surprised with the song’s was an immediate success. Audiences around the world loved the song, and so back into the film soundtrack it went. “The Way We Were” became Streisand’s first #1 hit single, and it even bounced Ringo Starr out of the #1 spot in the US (for his very popular version of the be-bop tune, “You’re Sixteen”). Likewise, it immediately hit the charts in Canada, the UK, and Australia. Imagine not recognizing the value of this song? Here are just some of the awards it won:

The film soundtrack shortly became a gold album and reached the Top 20 on the Billboard 200. As a single, the title song went gold as well, selling more than two million copies. And the awards went on and on and on.
“The Way We Were” was named the pop hit of 1974.
That year it also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song.
It won Marvin Hamlisch and the Bergmans two Oscars: one for Best Music Score and another for Best Original Song.
It won a Grammy for The Song of the Year.
It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1988.
It placed at Number 8 in The American Film Institute’s list of The Top 100 Songs of 100 Years.
The Recording Industry Association of American and The National Endowment for the Arts both inducted the song into their lists of Songs of the Century.

And I’ve heard that in many circles, “The Way We Were” is considered Barbra Streisand’s best-ever recording. I’m not sure of that, because she had so many very fine recordings, not to mention all of her film musical pieces. But while I am listening to this song, I kind of agree with the assessment. So it has a little schmaltz? What is life without a bit that particular ingredient?

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Below are three versions of “The Way We Were” as recorded by Barbra Streisand: one from her own platinum album of the same name, one released as the single that hit #1 everywhere, and one released in the film soundtrack. Each is a little different. Let me know which you like the best.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and access to our full archive and to comments and discussions. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!

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"When Textbooks Upheld the Ideals of Our Ancestors"

Anthony Esolen — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:03:49 GMT

Still good this weekend!

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In my podcast today, I’m reading one of my favorite articles, in which I look closely at a book that seems to me like a message from another world, but surely wasn’t intended as such by its author and editor. You’ll see why I say so when you find out what the book was. The article fits very well with our week on memorials, because I am giving tribute to a man of wisdom who did excellent work in educating young people; because he himself gives tribute to the wise and artful writers not only of the American past but of those cultures distant in time and place that helped to build up the western mind; and because it brings back, in what I hope is an illuminating way, two authors we have often featured here at Word and Song, Alfred Tennyson, especially his great memorial poem In Memoriam A. H. H., and John Greenleaf Whittier, and in particular the poem he wrote as a memorial to his beloved sister Elizabeth, Snow-Bound.

This article has a couple of surprises in it — ones that I trust you will enjoy.

The text of today’s podcast first appeared in Crisis Magazine, 2014.

The Man Who Never Was (1956)

Anthony Esolen — Thu, 28 May 2026 12:02:47 GMT

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We are back in the United Kingdom — and Europe — for our Film of the Week, one of the most unusual war and espionage films ever made, The Man Who Never Was. It’s not unusual for spectacular scenery, massive destruction, and hair’s-breadth success in sabotage, like The Guns of Navarone. It’s not unusual for tense analysis of leadership under tremendous pressure, like Twelve O'Clock High. It doesn’t concentrate on one decisive battle, like The Longest Day, or on one towering warrior, like Patton. Yet it is absolutely fit for our week of the memorial, and it is largely based on a true operation, one of the cleverest pieces of misdirection in military history.

The Allies were set to invade Sicily, and thence make their way up the Italian peninsula, gutting the Axis powers in southern Europe and cutting their easiest east-west routes in two. Sicily is a very large and mountainous island, well-populated, not easy to conquer and control. Patton’s bloody sweep from Licata to Palermo in 1943 was a great triumph, precipitating the fall of Mussolini. Contributing to that triumph was something called “Operation Mincemeat,” devised by Lt. Commander Ewen Montagu, of the Royal Navy. The Allies wanted to keep as many German divisions as possible away from Sicily. That meant they had to trick the Germans into believing that the impending invasion of southern Europe would concentrate on Greece — again think of The Guns of Navarone — and not on Sicily. So Montagu came up with an ingenious plan, but one that required an extraordinary emotional sacrifice on the part of an ordinary Englishman who had lost his son.

The idea was this. The British knew that Nazi spies were operating on the southern coast of (neutral) Spain. So they planned for those spies to pick up, apparently by chance, a body floating at sea, a body of a British soldier carrying top-secret documents. The soldier was to have been lost in an apparent air crash, and drowned — which meant that Montagu had to choose, for his decoy, the body of a young man who had recently died of pneumonia. An entire identity had to be created for him out of whole cloth. The plan was to let the natural direction of the tides wash the body towards the Nazi outposts, and let the very industriousness and intelligence of the Nazis work against them. Of course the documents were false, and of course the Germans would be assiduous in taking measures to assure themselves of their truth. In the film — not in real life — that involved sending an Irish spy and assassin, a hater of all things British, to England to hunt down the fiancee of the supposed soldier, and to twist out of her who was who and what was what.

In real life, as in the film, the trick worked like a charm. The invasion of Sicily was in its third week (!), and the Nazis still believed that the real action was going to come in Greece. Let us say that the British depended on the Nazi high command’s being too clever by half. Hitler fell for it too. The wiser Nazi officers who were skeptical of it all were overruled.

It is a fascinating film, pitting intelligence against intelligence, keen vision against keen vision; also hope against a feeling of defeat or futility, and perseverance above all. The cast is top-of-the-line. Lt. Com. Montagu is played by one of our favorites, the intelligent and perceptive Clifton Webb, perfect for the role, that of a man somewhat advanced in years, whose work in the war must involve the mind and not the body — much like Burgess Meredith’s superb role as the strategist of In Harm’s Way. The Irish assassin is — who else? — Stephen Boyd, debonair, cunning, malign, and dangerous in the extreme. Gloria Grahame plays a young woman who has just received the devastating news that her fiancee has died in action — and plays that part, sincerely, in front of the Irish assassin. We have also Michael Hordern (see him as the much-hated Uncle Featherstone in the BBC’s excellent adaptation of Middlemarch), Cyril Cusack (see him as the leader of the holdouts for the old ways in Catholics, but also as the chief “fireman,” that is, burner of books, in Fahrenheit 451), Geoffrey Keen (the second-in-command in a great British show about Scotland Yard, Gideon’s Way), Joan Hickson (one of the Miss Marples in British television’s adaptations of Agatha Christie’s stories featuring that old woman sleuth), and many others.

The final scene, a quiet one and filled with pathos, occurs at a cemetery, at the memorial for the man who never was.

Today we have the trailer for “The Man Who Never Was,” a very fine film, which we highly recommend.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and access to our full archive and to comments and discussions. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!

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On Shakespeare

Anthony Esolen — Wed, 27 May 2026 12:01:56 GMT

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Back in 1983, when I visited Italy for the first time, traveling alone for three months (though for four wonderful weeks I stayed with two different sets of cousins), I went to Mantua, falling in with a bus full of lively high school kids from Switzerland, and there we saw the great memorial the Mantovani built in honor of the poet Virgil, who was born there. His tomb is in Naples, built by his patron Augustus Caesar — Virgil died in Brundisium (modern Brindisi), intending to board a ship on his way to Greece. He asked his friends for two favors as he lay dying. One was that they would see to his burial at his villa and farm outside of Naples; that land was a gift from Augustus. The other was that they would burn his nearly-finished poem, the Aeneid. They kept the first promise, and all lovers of poetry will thank them for breaking the second. On that monument in Mantua, I read the words that Tennyson wrote specifically for it, whenever the Mantovani would get round to completing the work. Its last stanza is pure gold:

I salute thee, Mantovano,
I that loved thee since my day began,
Wielder of the stateliest measure
Ever moulded by the lips of man.

He’s talking about the meter that Virgil used not only for his Aeneid but for the rest of his major poems too, dactylic hexameter, Homer’s meter for the Iliad and the Odyssey.

How often do artists craft memorials in honor of a great predecessor? Not often enough, I’d say!

And why don’t they? Vanity, I guess, or envy. But great souls aren’t threatened by the great. Einstein said he wanted to go to Princeton and work there, because he’d get to have lunch with Kurt Goedel — the greatest logician and philosopher of mathematics in modern times, and, by the way, a Lutheran and a devout believer in God. Bach traveled a long way as a teenage boy so he could meet the greatest organist of his day, Buxtehude, and maybe get to study under him. Donatello went to Rome to dig up, under more than a thousand years of sediment and debris, old Roman copies of Greek statuary, to learn from them. And the author of our Poem of the Week, John Milton, was a great man too, and a proud man. His poetic ambitions were immense. And it was he who wrote that the desire for fame is “the last infirmity of noble mind.” Yet when he was 21, he wrote this magnificent tribute to Shakespeare, who had died in 1616, fourteen years before.

If you go to Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace, you can visit the old family home, which has been restored. Originally, the two-story building was walled with wattle-and-daub to fill in a wood frame, but that’s not because the Shakespeare family was poor. For the time, the Bard’s father, John, made a good living. Debra and I visited there on our honeymoon in 1987, so we can’t say what the “Shakespeare Center” next to it is all about, and whether it does justice to the greatest author who ever lived, or whether it’s got more of the same dreary political correctness you find in a lot of memorials now — very often of a sort to try to besmear a great man or chop him down to size.

The wonderful thing about Milton’s tribute is that he says that Shakespeare doesn’t need a big monument, something that would take a lifetime to construct. Even a pyramid for Shakespeare — think of those slave-built tombs that tower up out of the level sands of Egypt — would be unnecessary, and too little at that. When we read Shakespeare’s plays, Milton suggests to us, we become astonished. He takes our breath away. We lose ourselves in wonder. We cannot move. Our minds, our souls become the monuments. Kings themselves, says Milton, would wish to die, if only they could have such a memorial!

It occurs to me that above all, we ought to instill such gratitude and wonder in our students when they study great things. A long time ago, I was in Minneapolis to give a talk on Shakespeare’s Tempest, and I said that wonder was what Shakespeare meant to convey, and most of all, the wonder we should feel when a man dead in sin and guilt is restored to life, since, morally, that is what happens in the play. I also had some hard things to say about teachers who instill in students an attitude of suspicion or political superiority. So it was reported in the student newspaper at the University of Minnesota, that I was opposed to “critical thinking.” Predictable.

Milton, how you would have answered, I shudder to think!

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What needs my Shakespeare for his honored bones
The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid   
Under a star-ypointing pyramid?
Dear son of Memory, great heir of fame,
What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thyself a live-long monument.
For whilst to th’ shame of slow-endeavouring art   
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart   
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,   
Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,   
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving;
And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie,
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

Holy Spirit, Lord of Light (Veni, Sancte Spiritus)

Anthony Esolen — Tue, 26 May 2026 12:03:05 GMT

What is the most sublime of Christian hymns? Our current Hymn of the Week deserves strong consideration. Its common name, The Golden Sequence, suggests how deeply beloved it was, for its earnest appeal to the Holy Spirit, its clarity, its concern with the ultimate things, and — for all that — its sweetness. It is the traditional “sequence” chanted or sung between the epistle and the gospel at Pentecost.

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“What’s a sequence?” you ask. Some years ago, I saw a shelf of books gathering dust in a closet at Notre-Dame de l’Assumpcion, the grand old church on the island in Nova Scotia where we live for part of the year. They were titled “Paroissien Romain,” chant-books, 1900 pages long, to be sung on Sundays and feast days throughout the year. In one way, the chants were simple. They were to be sung in unison. They sported no abrupt or unusual intervals. But “horizontally,” they were a subtle weave of notes composed to bring out, meditatively, the meaning of the words, without worrying about measures. So a single syllable, like the last a in alleluia, might linger on for twenty or thirty notes, lovingly, or joyously, or solemnly, depending on the subtleties of the melody and its coloring for the particular feast. Sometime in the first millennium, someone got the idea to insert, into what was a far longer melisma on that final a, a short verse in prose, to be sung to its own melody. Then the a would resume, with perhaps another insertion of a verse, and another, and so on. “Sequence” originally referred to the long succession of musical notes at the end of the alleluia; but then the verses ordered to the sequence or to the sequences took that name for themselves.

I’ve said the verses were first in prose, and each section of a verse would be sung to its own melody, because, after all, prose isn’t organized according to meter. You can see this sort of thing mostly preserved in the Easter Sequence, Victimae paschali (Christians, to the Paschal Victim). But in the second millennium, poetry in rhyming stanzas really flourished, beginning in France and spreading all over Europe. So the Sequences composed in the high Middle Ages are like ours this week: in stanzas, with rhymes and a precise metrical order, so that each stanza may be sung to the same melody. Thus the sequences took on the structure and the character of hymns.

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Want a sign that the people in those times lived in a far different world from ours — I mean the world of the religious imagination? Consider the author of the Golden Sequence. We don’t know who he was, and already that is telling: the work itself was the prize, not the fame. But the main possibilities are fascinating. It’s been attributed to Hermannus Contractus (Blessed Hermann the Cripple, 1013-1054), a brilliant monk afflicted with cerebral palsy, who could not speak till he was five, and could not move from one end of his room in the monastery to the other without wheels and braces and levers. Hermann was a scientist, mathematician, theologian, musical composer, and poet. He certainly could have written it. Others attributed the Golden Sequence to King Robert II of France (Robert the Pious), the son of Hugh Capet; Robert reigned from 996-1031, and it is the sort of thing he would doubtless have done, had he conceived of it. Still others attribute it to Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1207-1228. Langton too was a brilliant man, so the attribution is by no means odd. But do you notice what happened right in the middle of those years? King John of England — the vacillating and treacherous brother of King Richard I, the Lion-Hearted — hated Langton and bitterly opposed his appointment to Canterbury. John managed to alienate everybody, and his own nobles, with the strong assistance of Archbishop Langton and the Church, checkmated him at Runnymede in 1215, where they compelled John to sign Magna Carta — the Great Charter, delineating the liberties of English noblemen and freemen. The man behind the scenes then was watching things from Rome: the most powerful of medieval popes, a man of exceptional political and administrative skill, Innocent III (r. 1198-1216). A contemporary wrote that the Pope himself was the author of several hymns and sequences, including the Golden.

Now imagine you have a hymn of surpassing beauty, wisdom, and power, and the main candidates for its authorship are a mathematician and scientist with a debilitating neurological disease (can you think of one?), the current Prime Minister of France, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, and so forth — you see what I mean. A different world.

The hymn itself is a long petition, which we can conveniently divide into five stanzas of six lines each, rhyming AABCCB; or you into ten stanzas of three lines, since there is always a firm stop after the third line. The author not only used the same rhyme for the third and sixth lines as above; he used that same rhyme for all the third and sixth lines. So all the triplets rhyme with each other. The effect is to grow in quiet and confident strength. The poet understood what repetition was for: lines 1, 4, 5, and 6 all begin with the imperative veni — come! The fourth stanza is a series of six imperatives, with their initial words all rhyming: lava, riga, sana — wash, moisten, heal; then flecte, fove, rege — bend, warm, guide. The last stanza repeats the structure of the first as regards the initial word, but here it is not veni, but da — give! And what do we ask to be given?

First, the sacrum septenarium, the sacred sevenfold, that is, the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, as we find them enumerated in Isaiah 11: the Messiah will be endowed with the Spirit of wisdom, of understanding, of counsel, of fortitude, of knowledge, of godliness, and of the fear of the Lord. The last three lines beg for the reward of virtue, the goal of salvation, and, to sum it all up, eternal joy.

And yet, for all those exalted thoughts, there beats in the poem a warm heart for human suffering, human hopes, human weakness, and human longing. You can spend a life meditating on any one of the sentences and not come to an end of its richness, not because the poet was clever, though he was, but because the words are true. (I will give them below in the translation by Edward Caswall, followed by the Latin.)

Note: As some of you know, we have been finding fewer and fewer free selections available to share from the old-standby, Youtube. For today, Debra has to offer two music-only versions of our hymn. We hope that you might enjoy singing along with one of these. We prefer organ accompaniment at the Esolen house (we have a home-grown organist!) But the second video provides you the music, the words, and the sheet music in a very unobtrusive package.

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1 Holy Spirit, Lord of Light,
From Thy clear celestial height
Thy pure beaming radiance give:
Come, Thou Father of the poor!
Come, with treasures which endure!
Come, Thou Light of all that live!

2 Thou, of all consolers best,
Visiting the troubled breast,
Dost refreshing peace bestow;
Thou in toil art comfort sweet,
Pleasant coolness in the heat,
Solace in the midst of woe.

3 Light immortal! Light divine!
Visit Thou these hearts of Thine,
And our inmost being fill;
Where Thou art not, man hath naught,
Nothing good in deed or thought,
Nothing free from taint of ill.

4 Heal our wounds, our strength renew;
On our dryness pour Thy dew;
Wash the stains of guilt away;
Bend the stubborn heart and will;
Melt the frozen, warm the chill;
Guide the steps that go astray.

5 Thou, on those who evermore
Thee confess and Thee adore,
In Thy sevenfold gifts, descend:
Give them comfort when they die,
Give them life with Thee on high,
Give them joys that never end.  Amen.

1 Veni, Sancte Spiritus,
et emitte caelitus
lucis tuae radium.
Veni, Pater pauperum,
veni, dator munerum,
veni, lumen cordium.

2 Consolator optime,
dulcis hospes animae,
dulce refrigerium,
in labore requies,
in aestu temperies,
in fletu solatium.

3 O lux beatissima,
reple cordis intima
tuorum fidelium.
Sine tuo numine
nihil est in homine,
nihil est innoxium.

4 Lava quod est sordidum,
riga quod est aridum,
sana quod est saucium.
Flecte quod est rigidum,
fove quod est frigidum,
rege quod est devium.

5 Da tuis fidelibus,
in te confitentibus,
sacrum septenarium.
Da virtutis meritum,
da salutis exitum,
da perenne gaudium.  Amen.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and access to our full archive and to comments and discussions. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!

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MEMORIAL

Anthony Esolen — Mon, 25 May 2026 12:03:34 GMT

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On the side of a big rock, near where we live, you can read these words in bright white paint: “I LOVE YOU, CHICKEN FARMER!” I like that. I like memorials, our Word of the Week. Sometimes it’s a sign set down by the person himself, as when my cousins Joe and Tom and Frankie painted their initials on the rocky approach to a cliff a few hundred yards behind our dead-end street. “Beech trees keep their bond,” I’ve written, and if you find an older one of those trees in a place where young people have been, expect to see initials and names carved into the trunk, especially the names of a boy and girl in love. I remember a large marble slab set into the wall of my boyhood church, bearing the names of people who donated money to the church for the installment of the stained glass windows, I suppose, or to pay the Italian painter they hired to cover the whole interior, including the ceiling, with sacred art. One name remains etched in my mind: “Mrs. Nellie Naylor.”

Of course, you can overdo any good thing. Alexander the Great left memorials wherever he went on his conquests, founding city after city and naming them after himself. That’s why we have an Alexandria in Egypt, and a Kandahar in Afghanistan. Most of the cities he founded, though, have long since fallen into ruin and oblivion, where “the lone and level sands stretch far away,” or some newer city, like Herat in Afghanistan, has been built near one of them or on top of it. Yet the instinct for building memorials to people we honor is sound and good. There’s a fine memorial to Abraham Lincoln in the Chicago park named for him; and why should not the state that calls itself “Land of Lincoln” have such a memorial? Why, he himself etched his words indelibly on the American mind, when he went to Gettysburg, several months after the battle there, to dedicate a cemetery in honor of the Union soldiers who fell.

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Very often, streets and roads become memorials when the places or the persons for which they were named have ceased to be. We live on School Street, but there is no school on it. There was an Academy Street a hundred feet below the base of the cliff I mentioned above, but the “academy” it was named for lasted only a few years, a long time ago. There is a Town Farm Road in the Rhode Island town where we lived for 21 years, so named for a “Poor Farm” the town ran there in the 19th century — a place where the destitute or the homeless could be cared for and could sometimes be set to useful employment. That name is the more poignant, because not only is the farm not there; there is no such in the entire state, not anymore — the very idea of such a place seems to have been lost. It is well then that at least the name remains.

Milton cared about names, not so much because he was a great poet, but because he was a human being. What can be more of an annihilation than to lose your very name? The fallen angels no longer retain their names in heaven: they are blotted out. Satan’s name, says Raphael, “is heard no more in heaven. Whatever power the fallen angels had, they turned toward evil: “Therefore eternal silence be their doom.” When the wicked Cardinal in The Duchess of Malfi dies, he says, in his despair, “And now, I pray, let me be laid by, and never thought of.” Wicked or not, that’s the state of man according to nature alone. Then it’s as the Psalmist says: Our days are swift, the wind sweeps over us, and our place knows us no more. But that’s not the last word. Man forgets, but God remembers. Why, Milton gives us memorials in heaven itself, emblazoned on flags, “holy memorials, acts of zeal and love / Recorded eminent.” And I think it needn’t be on flags or stones or walls or the trunks of beech trees. Somehow, the history of a human being is written on the face. We see it even here on earth, in this life; in the bright eyes of an old man who retains his frolic humor from childhood and all his years; in the kindly regard of an old woman like my grandmother, my father’s mother, meek and gentle, not unacquainted with sadness.

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I’m very fond of that happy inspiration Dante had, of setting two rivers at the top of the mountain of Purgatory. One is Lethe, which causes you to forget all your sins, making them seem to you as if someone else had committed them. But the other, the climactic one, is Eunoe — pronounced euphoniously, with four syllables, eh-oo-no-EH. When you are baptized in that river, you come forth remembering all the good things you have ever done. And I guess that if you pressed Dante about it, he’d say that even those things you hadn’t forgotten before you were plunged into that river would appear before you in their fullness, as if they were immediate, and brighter than they were even at the time.

Today, as our American readers will know, is our Memorial Day, when we honor the soldiers who died in the service of our nation. But long ago, people began also to honor the dead who had served in uniform, even if they did not die in the line of duty. And while people were at it, they began to decorate the graves of all their loved ones — in fact, the first name for the holiday, instituted in 1868, was Decoration Day. It’s a federal holiday, and so the schools will be closed, and the post office, but that makes it a good day for baseball in the afternoon, and family get-togethers, and cookouts; the unofficial first day of summer.

The word comes to us from Latin, both directly and through Old French, and it’s related to a large group of words in our language-family that have to do with memory, the mind, and thought. Mimir was the Old Norse god of memory, whose severed head Odin kept nearby, to give him good advice, because when you have a strong memory of the past, the chances and changes of the future don’t surprise you so much. The Greek goddess Mnemosyne was the mother of the Muses: it’s memory that inspires you to sing epic poetry, as it’s mindfulness that causes you to look up at the stars. The Hindu mantra is a chant of praise, a sacred text committed to the mind and heart, though, alas, the English adoption of the word has turned ironic and sour, suggesting something you repeat but do not really think about. But maybe the most charming cousin is the Old French mignon, which wasn’t a cut of steak, but a sweetheart, a darling, a “minion” but without any irony. And that, dear Readers, brings us all the way back to the beech tree!

Centennial Exibit, Philadelphia. 1876.

"The Lady is a Tramp"

Debra Esolen — Sat, 23 May 2026 12:01:17 GMT

Who doesn’t love a tuneful and witty song by Dick Rodgers and Larry Hart? Hmm. I don’t see any hands going up, so I will assume that I’ve got this one in the bag! My admiration for that wonderful team knows no bounds (see more about them here and here and here). This week we are slinging the slang around a bit, and no one could do that better than the lyrical Larry Hart. And I’m definitely not whistling “Dixie” about that!

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“The Lady is a Tramp” became one of the most popular songs of the year in 1937, when it was released on Broadway in “Babes in Arms,” the sixth Broadway show Rodgers and Hart wrote together out of 28 total musicals and over 500 individual songs for Broadway, then Hollywood, then again Broadway, until Hart’s death in 1943. Their collaboration lasted just shy of 25 years, after which Rodgers entered an era of highly successful plays and films with Oscar Hammerstein, whom he had first met as a freshman in college at Columbia, when Hammerstein was a judge and advisor for the student “Follies” of 1920. So as it happened Hammerstein, who contributed a song and helped with the writing of that college show, was in on the first-ever Rodgers and Hart musical production. At that time, Oscar Hammerstein was an established lyricist, only a few years away from a successful partnership with the great Jerome Kern, with whom he would soon produce a landmark in American musical theater, “Showboat.” Who could have imagined then that Oscar would spend the last twenty years of his life and his career as partner to that freshman, Dick Rodgers, in what many consider to be the greatest musical theater collaboration of all time? I’d say that the stars aligned with this trio of talent, wouldn’t you? Their ducks were all in a row, anyhow.

As for the musical, “Babes in Arms,” from which our song today is drawn, the libretto was pretty slim. In fact, I might even call the story hokey. It would have had to rise a bit to reach the level of corny. But what music it inspired! I’ve written before about another hit song from that play, “My Funny Valentine.” You can read more about “Babes in Arms” here. But what about “The Lady is a Tramp?” Well, obviously the slang term “tramp” as we know and mostly use it now had already entered common usage by the 1930’s. But I am old enough to remember when the word was considered the word was used to mean a lazy fellow who went from place to place, sometimes by hitching a ride on a train — sort of like the bums that Joel McCrea hobnobbed with in our film of a while back, Sullivan’s Travels. Oops! If I had used the word “bum” as a kid, my mother would have at least threatened to wash my mouth out with soap! “Bum” was a word of disrespect. She preferred “hobo,” also slang, but kinder. “Tramp,” when I was a kid, was also a term used for hobos (and you will hear a nifty variation on the word, too, in this song, with Larry Hart’s charming coinage of the word “hobohemia” — which is not to be construed to mean “fear of hobos,” by the way.

Of course there was another application for that word, “tramp,” which Hart was playing on too, one that nobody’s mother ever told her child the meaning of. However, when Hart got his hands on the word he put the shoe on the other foot, you might say — mixing your metaphors! For in this song, the lady who was called a tramp was no such thing. She was just being maligned for not being part of high society — with its “cocktails at five,” “dinner at eight,” and the practice of ladies of arriving late for events to show themselve better than others, and of going to the opera not for the music but to flaunt ther high brows. So Larry Hart turns the tables and shows this particular lady to be freer (though not in the way of a “tramp” as the slangers would sling it) and happier as a nobody than she ever could have been as a member of the high and mighty crowd.

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This song is simply charming, down to the ground. I’ve included for all of you the full verse and the complete lyrics to read and enjoy. See how many slang terms, euphemisms, and implied jokes you can find in it. Over time, “The Lady is a Tramp” took on a life of its own, as popular songs often do, and it seems that every singer sang a customized version of the lyrics, usually much shorter than the original, which was more suited to a theater than to a jukebox. I’ll spare you the list of the more than 500 artists who recorded it. But when Frank Sinatra sang it in another Rodgers and Hart musical-turned-film, “Pal Joey” (1957), he made it his own. “The Lady is a Tramp” was not a song from the original play, “Pal Joey.” And it was not sung in the 1937 film version of “Babes in Arms,” either; for that film it was used only as an instrumental. I am guessing that Hollywood didn’t want to go near the song back then, thinking that viewers (or censors) would find it offensive. Or maybe Columbia Pictures didn’t want to plug MGM film with a reference to “Gone with the Wind?” Either way, that charming verse was cut.

But as sung by Frank Sinatra in “Pal Joey,” the song made a huge comeback — not that it had ever wandered far from the public ear. Sinatra’s recording of “The Lady is a Tramp” for Columbia Records was released in 1957 as the lead song of an album of the same name. He recorded it commercially several more times in his career, and featured the song in almost every concert he did from then on. The great number of commercial recordings of “The Lady is a Tramp” attests to its being a true “singers’ song.” Women could and did sing it; men also, with some slight variations, could and did sing it; and men and women sang it in duets. I call that a boffo song!

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I’ve included below four versions of our Sometimes a Song. The first, and fullest, is performed by Mary Martin in aI 1940’s Broadway revival of “Babes in Arms.” Even her version leaves out the last two charming portions of the song. The second version is one recorded by the wonderful Lena Horne in the biopic released after Larry Hart’s death, in a fictionalized account of his life, which was much sadder than the movie tells. This may be my daughter’ favorite version. The third version below is sung by the marvelous Ella fitzgerald, short and wonderful, with her excellent vocals and phrasing. And last but not least, I’ve included a recording of The Voice, Old Blue Eyes himself, the one from 1957. I hope you enjoy all of these, and that you also look at the original lyrics to get the full fun out of the song.

VERSE

I’ve wined and dined on Mulligan stew
And never wished for turkey
As I hitched and hiked and grifted, too,
From Maine to Albuquerque.
Alas, I missed the Beaux Arts Ball,
And what is twice as sad,
I was never at a party
Where they honored Noel Ca’ ad.
But social circles spin too fast for me.
My Hobohemia is the place to be.

I get too hungry for dinner at eight.
I like the theater but never come late.
I never bother with people I hate.
That’s why the lady is a tramp.

I don’t like crapgames with Barons and Earls,
Won’t go to Harlem in ermine and pearls,
Won’t dish the dirt with the rest of the girls.
That’s why the lady is a tramp.

I like the free fresh wind in my hair,
Life without care.
I’m broke, it’s oke!
Hate California, it's cold and it's damp.
That’s why the lady is a tramp.

I go to Coney -- the beach is divine.
I go to ball games -- the bleachers are fine.
I follow Winchell and read ev’ry line.
That’s why the lady is a tramp.

I like a prizefight that isn’t a fake.
I love the rowing on Central Park Lake.
I go to operas and stay wide awake.
That’s why the lady is a tramp.

I like the green grass under my shoes.
What can I lose?
I’m flat! That’s that!
I’m all alone when I lower my lamp.
That’s why the lady is a tramp.

Don’t know the reason for cocktails at five.
I don’t like flying -- I’m glad I’m alive!
I crave affection, but not when I drive!
That’s why the lady is a tramp.

Folks go to London and leave me behind.
I’ll miss the crowning. Queen Mary won’t mind.
I don’t play Scarlett in "Gone With the Wind!"
That’s why the lady is a tramp.

I like to hang my hat where I please,
Sail with the breeze.
No dough? Heigh-ho!
I love La Guardia and think he’s a champ.
That’s why the lady is a tramp.

Girls get massages, they cry and they moan.
Tell Lizzie Arden to leave me alone!
I’m not so hot, but my shape is my own.
That’s why the lady is a tramp!

The food at Sardi’s is perfect, no doubt.
I wouldn’t know what the Ritz is about.
I drop a nickel, and coffee comes out.
That’s why the lady is a tramp!

I like the sweet, fresh rain in my face.
Diamonds and lace?
No got. So what?
For Robert Taylor I whistle and stamp.
That's why the lady is a tramp!

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and access to our full archive and to comments and discussions. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!

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Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby

Anthony Esolen — Fri, 22 May 2026 12:02:56 GMT

Dear Readers: It’s a week for slang — and that, I guess, is close enough for a really rich and colorful story told in southern and African-American dialect, from the late 1800’s. This is probably the most famous of all Joel Chandler Harris’s stories about Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox, a story I read in mostly regular English when I was a little boy. And it has given American English the word “tar-baby,” to mean something that you’d better not get tangled up with, because if you do, you’re just going to get caught worse and worse. But Br’er Rabbit comes out of it all right in the end — he has to, because he’s Br’er Rabbit, outfoxing Br’er Fox!

I hope you will enjoy listening to this as much as I enjoyed reading it. This one too is for children of all ages.

Illustration, Public Domain.

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The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)

Anthony Esolen — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:19:49 GMT

A sweet old lady in a boarding house has been waiting for one of her fellow roomers, Mr. Holland (Alec Guinness), to continue reading aloud from a cops and robbers book, You’d Look Swell in a Shroud. It is a spree of slang in the word’s original signification, as I said on Monday — the patois of “tramps and thieves.”

“Duke Milligan was about to take a gander at Mickey the Greek’s hideout,” says Mrs. Chalk, helping Mr. Holland to find his place.

“Oh yes, here we are,” he says, leaning back into the sofa. He’s a mild-mannered bank clerk, but we see already that there’s a glint of mischief in his eye. Not that anybody at the bank would notice it. For years, he’s supervised the transfer of gold bullion in an armored car from the foundry to the bank, sometimes pausing to pick up a stray grain with the tip of his umbrella to put it back with the rest of the liquid gold. “That one speck,” he is accustomed to saying, “would be worth six shillings on the market.” He rides in the back of the truck, and he’s cultivated a habit, taken lightly by the drivers, of pressing the alarm button to make them pull over to the side of the road, because somebody might be following them. In other words, he’s been working at establishing this habit and his reputation for scrupulosity — planning for the heist of the century.

He continues to read: “I handed my fedora to a hatcheck girl with all that Venus de Milo had got and then more, and I was admiring the more when I glimpsed something in the back of this frail that set my underwear creeping up on me like it had legs.”

“I know that feeling well,” says the old lady.

Here is the setup of the film. Holland — who will, of course, gladly permit himself to be nicknamed “Dutch” by his associates — wants to steal one of the weekly bullion deliveries, but he knows that the real trouble with gold ingots is that you can’t easily get them out of the country. They’re too obvious. But one day, a Mr. Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway; you may remember him as Eliza’s raffish father in My Fair Lady) moves in to the house, and his business is in making and peddling souvenirs. The particular souvenir we’re concerned with? Lead paperweights of the Eiffel Tower, painted gold! He makes them in his small foundry, then ships them to Paris to be sold to tourists — English tourists, especially. Pendlebury seems like an upper-class man out at heels, but he does a brisk business. And that’s when Mr. Holland, who also wants to live a very different life from the one he’s got, makes him a proposition, that they get together in crime. But they will need two assistants from the genuine criminal class, and how they manage to recruit them and secure their trust and loyalty is, if I may indulge a bit of slang myself, a real hoot!

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The film wouldn’t work if we sensed that any of the four members of this “Lavender Hill Mob” were actuated by malice or real greed. Then we’d end up with something like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, or rather that film if the writers and the director couldn’t make up their minds about it. So everybody we meet is likeable, except for an impossibly slow clerk at the ticket office in Calais for ships crossing the channel back to England, but since the purpose of such a clerk is to prevent as many people as possible from boarding their ships or planes or trains or buses, I suppose we can forgive him too. We like the police detective who figures out the ruse; that’s the actor John Gregson, the Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard, in a very fine British television show, “Gideon’s Way” (a spinoff from the excellent film Gideon’s Day, starring another of our favorites here, Jack Hawkins).

The Lavender Hill Mob was a product of Ealing Studios, which for ten years or so produced a run of exceptional comedies, with the Ealing touch of zaniness and the comic clash of social classes. Alec Guiness was a regular in those, most notably in a comedy of one murder after another, Kind Hearts and Coronets, wherein he plays eight different characters, including an old duchess with the tremolo voice that comes with real breeding. We’ve featured one of those comedies here, the thoroughly amiable A Run for Your Money. Alec Guiness is in that one too, but there he’s the straight man. Here he’s the central figure, whom everybody likes, and with pretty good reason. I’ve never seen him go through the motions in anything. His hallmarks are intelligence and grace. We’ve done several of his films here. You’ll have heard of most of them, but perhaps not A Majority of One — an unusual and heartfelt romance, worthy of his talents.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and access to our full archive and to comments and discussions. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!

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The Old Swimmin' Hole

Anthony Esolen — Wed, 20 May 2026 12:00:56 GMT

As many of our readers may know, I’m a defender of languages threatened by mass media. It pains me to consider that one great limb of our linguistic family tree, the Celtic, is in very rough shape. How extensive those languages used to be, especially from about 500 B. C. to the time of Christ, we can gather from important names for where Celtic peoples lived: Gaul (on both sides of the Alps), Galicia in what is now Spain, Galatia in what is now Turkey, and of course the British isles, and the part of France still called Brittany. But right now, among the six still living Celtic languages, Irish, Scots Gaelic, Breton, Welsh, Manx, and Cornish, two of them have been revived from the dead (Manx, Cornish), and only Welsh is not threatened, though only one of six Welshmen can speak it.

What I say about languages I might also say about dialects, and even about our Word of the Week, slang. I don’t look forward to when there will be only one form of English, or when everybody in the world will speak it. I suppose there’s something just as bad as Babel, where nobody could understand anybody else. That’s when everybody will understand everybody else, because everybody will be saying the same stupid things, world without end. In a way, then, slang can be not only the source of new and colorful words and sayings; it can be a protection for old and even more colorful words and sayings. We say, “Don’t buy a pig in a poke,” meaning, “Don’t buy a pig in a pouch,” that is, a big pouch, a sack — and what lover of English would be content to lose that saying with its old slang? In most of the United States, that big sandwich with meat and cheese and lettuce and tomato and onions and peppers is a submarine, but in some places it’s a hero, where I grew up in Pennsylvania it’s a hoagie, in Louisiana it’s a po’-boy, but here in New Hampshire, and in an arc cutting through southern New England down into New Jersey, it’s a grinder. Don’t ask me why. And then there are those colorful off-color words for certain parts of the body, sometimes coarse, sometimes humorous. I needn’t get into those, right? Except to say that for my money the most humorous of them all is exactly right for working-class slang poking fun at the working-class themselves: the family jewels!

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Quite a few poets and novelists go out of their way to use the slang of farmers, infantrymen, miners, and others who aren’t using the King’s English at Oxford. Such slang helps to characterize a person in his social class or the place where he lives or works — the mountains, on board a ship, along the shores, with the British army in India, and so forth. I could have chosen “Gunga Din” by Kipling, for example — and that’s hardly the only poem Kipling wrote in slang. And we’ve got the same kind of thing from Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, George MacDonald, Robert Louis Stevenson, and many others. Stevenson? Think of the drunken song of the old sinner Billy Bones, singing “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!” But it wasn’t just British writers; James Fenimore Cooper’s hero Natty Bumppo speaks in an upstate New York slang, and if we lost the slang of Huck Finn and Jim, we’d lose most of their personalities to boot. Listen to the very opening of Huckleberry Finn, and you will sense how, in only a few sentences, a whole personality, that arch and clear-sighted boy Huck, begins to come to life:

You don’t know about me, without you have read a book called ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly — Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is — and Mary, and the widow Douglas, is all told about in that book — which is mostly a true book; with some stretchers, as I said before.

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But I’ve chosen for our Poem of the Week a little poem by an American who usually wrote in slang, and usually for light-hearted or sentimental work. He’s James Whitcomb Riley. He published a lot in my favorite popular magazine from the late 1800’s, The Century, but not usually where you would find the serious lyric poems, the ones they’d use to take up the rest of a page at the end of an article on science or politics or theology or the arts or anything else of social or spiritual or technological or artistic interest. They’d set him with several pages of humorous verse, “In Lighter Vein,” at the end of the editorials and letters to the editor, at the back of each issue, with many a comic drawing attached. Apparently Riley was much beloved, nor did he earn any scorn for his light poems, because there was plenty of room in people’s minds and hearts for all kinds of poetry, which was a far more important and cherished part of many people’s lives than we can now imagine.

Riley uses slangy grammar and pronunciation, often signaling them to us by a deliberate misspelling, to encourage us to hear the peculiarities of the old sentimentalist looking back on his boyish days. As I said, it’s light-hearted — yet, for all that, there’s a touch at the end that elevates the poem to a more solemn consideration, solemnity with a sure touch of humor to it. Boys in those days shucked their clothes to go swimming, and so Riley’s speaker, now an old man, looks forward to the time when there will be another kind of dip in the water.

“Old Swimming Hole.” Paul Detfelsen. Public Domain

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Oh! the old swimmin'-hole! whare the crick so still and deep
Looked like a baby-river that was laying half asleep,
And the gurgle of the worter round the drift jest below
Sounded like the laugh of something we onc't ust to know
Before we could remember anything but the eyes
Of the angels lookin' out as we left Paradise;
But the merry days of youth is beyond our controle,
And it's hard to part ferever with the old swimmin'-hole.

Oh! the old swimmin'-hole! In the happy days of yore,
When I ust to lean above it on the old sickamore,
Oh! it showed me a face in its warm sunny tide
That gazed back at me so gay and glorified,
It made me love myself, as I leaped to caress
My shadder smilin' up at me with sich tenderness.
But them days is past and gone, and old Time's tuck his toll
From the old man come back to the old swimmin'-hole.

Oh! the old swimmin'-hole! In the long, lazy days
When the humdrum of school made so many run-a-ways,
How plesant was the jurney down the old dusty lane,
Whare the tracks of our bare feet was all printed so plane
You could tell by the dent of the heel and the sole
They was lots o' fun on hands at the old swimmin'-hole.
But the lost joys is past! Let your tears in sorrow roll
Like the rain that ust to dapple up the old swimmin'-hole.

Thare the bullrushes growed, and the cattails so tall,
And the sunshine and shadder fell over it all;
And it mottled the worter with amber and gold
Tel the glad lilies rocked in the ripples that rolled;
And the snake-feeder's four gauzy wings fluttered by
Like the ghost of a daisy dropped out of the sky,
Or a wownded apple-blossom in the breeze's controle
As it cut acrost some orchard to'rds the old swimmin'-hole.

Oh! the old swimmin'-hole! When I last saw the place,
The scenes was all changed, like the change in my face;
The bridge of the railroad now crosses the spot
Whare the old divin'-log lays sunk and fergot.
And I stray down the banks whare the trees ust to be—
But never again will theyr shade shelter me!
And I wish in my sorrow I could strip to the soul,
And dive off in my grave like the old swimmin'-hole.

Go Down in the Lonesome Valley

Anthony Esolen — Tue, 19 May 2026 12:01:28 GMT

Yesterday, in talking about slang, a word which originally referred to the sly jargon of tramps and thieves, I suggested that the common people in their lives apart from dictionaries and encyclopedias are wonderful sources of colorful words and expressions. I mentioned some from baseball, and Debra tells me that when I was recording my entry aloud, she had all she could do to keep herself from bursting out in laughter at “the Tools of Ignorance,” meaning the equipment the catcher wears, and “can of corn,” for an easy pop fly to the outfield. I’m all for such slang, especially when it helps bind together people who do the same kind of work — sailors, for example, talking about “Davy Jones’ locker,” which is the bottom of the deep blue sea, or the American soldier’s “fruit salad,” the colorful medals and badges somebody gets to wear on his chest, or “hockey puck,” diner slang for a well-done hamburger. Um, I could mention some more colorful sayings, but you get the idea.

I think there’s a connection to be drawn between the popular use of language away from grammarians and lexicographers, and music that comes straight from the people without being filtered through the academies. Consider, for example, Christmas carols, to be found in every nation of Europe. For many of them, especially those that arose in the Middle Ages, we have no idea who the author was or where the melody came from; they seem to have sprung up like wild flowers. It was the energy of religious feeling that brought them to life. And something quite comparable happened among the Negro slaves in America before the Civil War, and after their emancipation too; a powerful feeling for the Savior, Jesus, and his promise of justice and salvation, of the new heaven and earth, where every tear will be wiped away.

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So I’ve chosen one of those spirituals for our Hymn of the Week. It’s called “Go Down in de Lonesome Valley” — it is not the country song that it seems to have inspired, the very different “Lonesome Valley,” a song that says that everybody’s got to walk that lonesome valley all by himself. There’s no strain of pride or rugged individualism in the spiritual. Instead it describes, in that inimitable key of the blacks in the American south, the yearning of the heart that Saint John of the Cross called “the dark night of the soul.” The refrain tells us, insistently, that if we are to “get religion,” we have to “go down in de lonesome valley.” That seems to mean that we go down into the depths of the conscience and the soul, where there are no distractions to comfort us, and none of that chatter we use amongst ourselves so that we never come to know the truth. And certainly, the lives the first singers of this song led called for plenty of meditation on the sorrows of this world, and on true liberty, which no political state, no matter how just, can provide.

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Here I’ll quote Col. T. W. Higginson, whose words the editors of Slave Songs in America (1867), the first such collection ever, append to this hymn:

‘De valley,’ and ‘de lonesome valley’ were familiar words in their religious experience. To descend into that region implied the same process with the ‘anxious-seat’ of the camp-meeting. When a young girl was to enter it, she bound a handkerchief by a peculiar knot over her head, and made it a point of honor not to change a single garment till the day of her baptism, so that she was sure of being in physical readiness for the cleansing rite, whatever her spiritual mood might be. More than once, in noticing a damsel thus mystically kerchiefed, I have asked some attendant its meaning, and have received the unfailing answer,— framed with their usual indifference to the genders of pronouns,— ‘He in de lonesome valley, sa.’

I’ve got today’s hymn in a version sung by the redoubtable Jester Hairston and his choir. I find the music to be sublime, soaring, haunting. Hairston had a very long life, dying in 2000 at the age of 98, and that meant a very long career, much of it spent in Hollywood. If you’ve ever heard the gospel song “Amen,” from one of our favorite films, Lilies of the Field, you’ve heard a song composed by Hairston himself, and so well done, so much in the spirit and the style of the spirituals, you’d think it had been sung for a hundred years. Another of his compositions, “Mary’s Boy Child,” became a popular carol overnight, with Harry Belafonte recording it on a single in 1956. But his musical work was remarkably extensive, as was his activity in general as a sometime actor in Hollywood (he is, for example, the courtly butler in In the Heat of the Night, and the father of the falsely convicted Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird), and a goodwill ambassador of music all over the world.

The text below is what was printed in the 1867 collection. Hairston and his choir are singing the refrain, with a couple of variants, as for instance “sister” once for “brother.” The key is F# minor — extremely unusual for a hymn. Notice that the choir sings the sixteenth notes almost as if they were quarter notes, which gives them plenty of breadth for harmonies that deliver a sense of awe impossible to put into words.

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My brudder, want to get religion?
Go down in de lonesome valley,
Go down in de lonesome valley, my Lord,
Go down in de lonesome valley,
To meet my Jesus dere.

2. O feed on milk and honey
3. O John he write de letter.
4. And Mary an' Marta read 'em.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and access to our full archive and to comments and discussions. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!

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SLANG

Anthony Esolen — Mon, 18 May 2026 12:01:39 GMT

Did you know that the word slang actually shows up in the King James Bible? Well, it does and it doesn’t. It’s when the boy David is going up against that Philistine with the big frame and the big mouth, Goliath of Gath. “And David put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and slang it, and smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone sunk into his forehead; and he fell upon his face to the earth.” Of course, that’s not the same word as the noun. That’s just the old past tense of the verb sling. All such verbs in that class once followed the form we hear in drink, drank, drunk. The loss of that second form and its being absorbed into the third, the past participle, has been going on for several hundred years. In some verbs, the shift is complete. So nobody would now readily understand the proverb that the radical Levelers in the 17th century were fond of:

When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?

Meaning, “When Adam dug the earth and Eve spun her thread at the distaff, where were all your fine lords and ladies then?” But in many verbs the process is incomplete. “I sung of Chaos and eternal Night,” says Milton in Paradise Lost, but for American speakers that would sound informal, even slangy: we still would use the form sang, for the past tense.

Which brings me to our Word of the Week in its proper sense: slang. It’s not in Dr. Johnson’s dictionary, but by the end of the 1700’s it appears to be well enough known, as the special language or patois of persons of low character. Often enough, in those early days, it’s the patois of thieves and others who want to communicate with each other and not have somebody nearby understanding what they’re talking about. Over time, many slang words do enter the language, sometimes even losing their stigma. But we do still have a lot of slang from the wrong side of the law: fuzz, box man (a safe-cracker), paperhanger (a forger), stir, shiv, clink, even, for the famous federal prison at Ossining, New York, Sing-Sing. I asked myself, “What’s the difference between slang and argot? In origin, nothing — argot was the slang of thieves in Paris in the 1800’s. How about between slang and jargon? Here Dr. Johnson’s entry is really illuminating: “Unintelligible talk; gabble; gibberish.” He doesn’t say that it’s understood by people who grew up on “the wrong side of the tracks,” as the description goes in the United States. He says that nobody can understand it.

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I’ve long thought that the nose-in-the-air language of literary theorists was no more than jargon in that sense, and that the people who used it only pretended to understand what it was supposed to mean, just so they could join the inner circle — a kind of intellectual thievery, not to pick your pocket but to pickle your brains. Dr. Johnson quotes an author who says that mathematics is as clear as day to someone who understands the terms, but to someone not versed in it, it will sound like nothing but jargon. Somebody pointed out to me yesterday that the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, which I saw when I went to a ballgame at the stadium there, featuring my favorite team, the Cardinals, was not a parabola, as people think, but a catenary: the curve that the focus of a parabola will describe as the parabola is rolled along a straight line. That made my eyes light up! But it would make a lot of people’s eyes glaze over — and very smart people, too.

But we shouldn’t be too snooty when it comes to slang, at least not in popular speech, because that’s where some vigorous and muscular and eye-popping creativity comes into play. “Chock-a-block” comes from ships and their block-and-tackle arrangements. “Finagle” comes from cheating at cards — but we don’t know how. Huck Finn, when he came up against something uncanny, would say that it gave him “the fantods” — maybe from “fantasy,” but that’s only a guess. If it’s not “the fantods,” it might be “the creeps” or “the heebie-jeebies.” In English we’re also fond of rhyming slang: “hanky-panky” is from British English, meaning “trickery,” but in America, and maybe in England too for all I know, it’s used mainly for adultery or embezzlement. Hell’s bells! Once you get the engine going on slang, you’ve got to run her into the ground before she’ll stop!

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Of course, sometimes a slang word grinds to a halt on its own, and disappears from the language, or is used only comically, as something absurdly obsolete. When I was a kid, it was “groovy” to use the word “groovy,” just as it was to wear plaid polyester pants, but if you use it now, you’ll mark yourself as somebody at the old folks’ home who wants to jiggle around on his cane while listening to The Rolling Stones. It’s as out of date as “hubba hubba” and “23-skidoo.” I could live without those, for sure. But I’d hate to find that all baseball slang had gone down the memory hole, because a lot of that was quite colorful. “Can of corn”? A lazy pop fly to the outfield. “Texas-Leaguer”? A softly-hit single or even double that happens to land where there ain’t nobody to catch it. “The Tools of Ignorance”? The equipment the catcher has to wear. “Chin music”? A fastball thrown deliberately right under the batter’s chin, to intimidate or defy. Some pitchers even nicknamed their favorite pitches: Randy Johnson’s slider (Mr. Snappy); Stu Miller’s daring slowball lob to the plate (the Eephus). Then there’s “pulling the string,” which makes sense if you suppose that there’s a string attached to the ball, and the pitcher can slow it down by pulling on it — hence it’s used for a pitch that fools the batter by getting him to swing too soon. I see that cricket players have their own colorful slang: the “cow corner” is the part of the field where the batsman is least likely to hit the ball — so called, I suppose, because the cows might as well be grazing out there.

How about the word itself? Where does it come from? Probably from our cousins in the Nordic countries, who after all did a lot of settling in the north of England in the Middle Ages (and in Ireland too, by the way; if your name is O’Neill, you likely have Viking blood in you, maybe even royal Viking blood). The noun came from certain uses of the verb to make compounds, such Swedish slängnamn, a “sling-name,” that is, a nickname, probably unflattering, like Fats or Slats or Stretch. In English, we say that somebody flings abuse at his opponent, but in the Nordic tongues they sling it — the idea is the same. So then, slang comes from the notion of slinging words and names around, and sometimes, like “white on rice,” as they say in Iowa, those words and names stick.

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Caravaggio, The Cardsharps (1594): Notice one ruffian signaling what the boy’s got in his hand, and the other ruffian with cards tucked in back!

"Octopus's Garden"

Debra Esolen — Sat, 16 May 2026 12:02:40 GMT

It’s spring in New Hampshire, May, in fact, and for the past two days we’ve had driving rain and overnight temperatures in the thirties, perilously close to freezing. We’d been all ready to work on our gardens, and had purchased plants for that purpose … but suddenly we were thrown into a dark, wet, cold world. While that’s not good for the tender new flowers, it’s evidently the perfect atmosphere for one kind of a garden, that of an octopus.

What?!, you say? Octopuses don’t have gardens. That was just a gag for an old Beatles song! Nay, nay! I found out the true story of the song and the inspiration for it while I was “noodling” around trying to decide on my song for this week. It seems, in fact, that Ringo Starr was inspired to write this song (and as you know he was not primarily known for being on the song-writing end of things with The Beatles) while on a boat near Sardinia, having his first-ever taste of squid. He’d ordered “fish & chips,” thinking of home. And the server brought him squid instead. His reaction to it was similar to mine on first taste: “It was rubbery, and tasted like chicken.” Striking up a conversation about the squid, Ringo found out that octopuses have a habit of roaming the shore bed and picking up pretty rocks or shiny objects, which they collect to build their dens (called gardens because they are so colorful). Did you know that? I didn’t. Neither did Ringo, evidently, but he was so charmed by the idea — and he was tired of the constant squabbling going on among the Fab Four at that time, shortly before their breakup — that he wrote a little song to lighten the mood. “With a little help” from his friend George Harrison, who contributed a chord orchestration and preliminary arrangement, our Sometimes a Song sprang into being. Eventually, the song was fleshed out and nurtured and became one of many charming tunes released on the album “Abbey Road,” in the fall of 1969, six months before the news of the band’s breakup was formally announced. “Octopus’s Garden” was the last song Ringo would with The Beatles.

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There’s a lot of back and forth among Rock ’n’ Roll afficianados about Ringo Starr’s ranking as a drummer. Certainly, he wasn’t just prop musician. With no formal musical training whatsoever, and really with almost no formal education of any kind — this due to his having been desperately sick for much of his childhood — Ringo nevertheless did “study” the drums. His teachers were the great drummers of the swing era, notably Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. He also was influenced by the C&W style of such singers as Hank Williams, Buck Owens, and Hank Snow, to whose music he listened intently, particularly to the percussion. In time, he imparted some of his love of country music to Beatles productions (as you will hear in today’s song). He also credited — of all people — Little Richard, with his odd keyboard style, for driving the lead in percussion for his music. From Little Richard, Starr imported a peculiar rhythm which he replicated on the drums.

To become a musician himself, Ringo learned by emulating the greats, and yet — his style became his own. One explanation for Ringo’s style was that he was a lefty who had learned to play on a drum kit for right handers. Without getting too technical here, Ringo’s style was more swing than rock, and that was part of what gave The Beatles their sound, and it suited some of the band’s more soulful work, as well. Drummers are often underrated and considered a bit like human metronomes by folks who don’t understand their art. And if a great band can be said to have a soul, the band’s drummer is in a real way its beating heart. Ringo Starr himself became a great influence on drummers who followed him. And in fact, Rolling Stone has ranked him at Number 14 in their list of The 100 Best Drummers of All Time. And that’s saying a lot, considering the competition for those 100 places.

So here are the boys doing their verion of Ringo’s song — and if you think that this production was a piece of cake to record, the drum portion alone required 32 takes before it was done. For “Octopus’s Garden” we’ve got

Ringo Starr on lead vocals, drums, and percussion
Paul McCartney on backup vocals, bass guitar, and piano
John Lennon on rhythm guitar
George Harrison – on lead guitar, backup vocals, special effects (blowing bubbles into a glass of milk through a straw)

Don’t miss George Harrison’s thoroughly entertaining rockabilly hot licks throughout, but particularly at the end!

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and access to our full archive and to comments and discussions. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!

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Eden, the Secret Garden, and preparing boys and girls for love

Anthony Esolen — Fri, 15 May 2026 12:02:01 GMT

Dear Readers, in keeping with this week on love, marriage, and gardens, I give you here a meditation on Genesis and the novel behind our Film of the Week, The Secret Garden. I’m quite fond of this, though in reading it, I didn’t attempt to do a British accent — and that’s probably all to the better!

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But this meditation, which in longer form I gave as a lecture about ten years ago, is for everybody who is raising boys and girls and who wants for them the best chance they can have for the sweetness of love.

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“Two Children,” Jan Verhas. Public Domain.

The Secret Garden (1949)

Anthony Esolen — Thu, 14 May 2026 12:02:47 GMT

The Wizard of Oz (which I’ve written about here) isn’t the only film that uses the motif of color to contrast with a world of black and white. In that film, it’s ordinary dusty old tornado-ridden Kansas that’s in black and white, with the life on the farm that Dorothy finds frustrating, so that she dreams of a place “Over the Rainbow,” and sure enough, while she’s unconscious, she “wakes up” to Munchkinland, the Yellow Brick Road, a field of red poppies, and the Emerald City, not to mention the wise Scarecrow who hasn’t got a brain, the sentimental Tin Man who hasn’t got a heart, and the blustery Lion who needs — courage.

”There’s no place like home,” says Dorothy, as she taps her ruby slippers three times. You might say the same of The Secret Garden, but with a couple of turns in the plot that make this film a good choice for our week with gardens. “My bride is a garden enclosed,” says the bridegroom in the Song of Songs, and, as I’ve said, that is what the word paradise means. (Strange and sad, by the way, that the word paradise was borrowed into Greek from ancient Persian, also a linguistic cousin of ours; and by rights that’s what Persia ought to have remained, and might have indeed — but that’s another story.)

In The Secret Garden, life is in black and white because human sorrow — and a sinful neglect — have made it so. Mr. Craven (Herbert Marshall, the brilliant understated actor who, unlike his more celebrated countryman Larry Olivier, never appears to be acting) has for many years been mourning the death of his young wife. In fact, he usually stays holed up in London, so that he does not have to be near the home that is painful to his memory. That home has a garden enclosed, too; locked up, apparently, and, as far as Mr. Craven knows, abandoned and let to go wild. He has forbidden his servants to enter it. It is dead to him. His wife loved that garden, but he hates it, because it was there that she suffered the accident that caused her death.

But there’s a difference, isn’t there, between what has always been wild, and what has been under the careful and loving hand of man, and then let go to seed? There’s no betrayal in a wilderness. If there’s sadness in an lonely stretch of prairie, never built upon by human hands, it’s a natural lonesomeness, without regret, without pain. But a ghost town? Or a ghost garden? That’s what the grieving husband wants to let that whole part of his life become. Yet the film, following the novel, shows that that is not possible.

It’s shown most powerfully in Craven’s son Colin (Dean Stockwell), who is apparently a cripple, and who torments the servants in the sprawling and spidery old mansion by his fits of screaming in pain. The father’s grief bids fair to destroy the son, not because he doesn’t love the boy, not because of any cruelty, but because he has shut himself up in his own sorrow. He has locked up his own heart, indulging his grief, while the boy indulges his frailty and the real or imagined pains in his legs.

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But, as in so many tales inspired by a Christian vision of the world, salvation comes to the man from a child, and in ways that he least expects. The child is his orphaned niece Mary (Margaret O’Brien, still with us at the age of 89), whose mother and father died of cholera in India. She has as much reason to grieve as does Mr. Craven, then, but instead she brings life and hope where she goes. Nor is she alone in the enterprise. Just as at Christmas, it was the shepherds and not the learned men of the world who first heard the news of the Savior’s birth, so we cross the social classes here too. Mary meets the kid brother of one of the servants, a country lad named Dickon (Brian Roper). Dickon knows all about birds and animals and growing things, and he is eager to show them to Mary, including his pet raven, Jimmy. It’s the raven that finds a key to the garden in the underbrush. Mary and Dickon enter, and all is color; and they tend the garden, at the same time as they befriend Colin — against the commands of his quack doctor — and take him outdoors, where he begins to live, for the first time in many years. Mr. Craven’s own conversion from death to life, from a death-like despair to love, is yet to come. The widower will be recalled to life by a thoroughly natural friendship between a boy and a girl.

The film keeps close to the children’s novel The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and I think that in this case, as also in The Wizard of Oz, the film is at least as good as the book. We see and hear the youthfulness, and its contrast with age, age not in the frolic winsomeness of old people whose very wrinkles seem to smile, but rather in a settled glumness, a conviction that nothing can ever be good or beautiful again. The child actors are terrific. Fans of the oddball television show Quantum Leap will remember Dean Stockwell as the balding and crusty admiral Al Calavicci, but he had a very long and celebrated career as a child actor, with a shock of curly brown hair and a face out of Botticelli. Margaret O’Brien, for my money twice the actress Shirley Temple was, might as well have directed on her own every scene she is in, so clearly does she know what she’s about. The country boy, Brian Roper, is at that age at which boys and girls become friends without a shade of suspicion that there is ever anything but friendship in the world, and he plays it without a flaw.

Here’s a film you can watch with all the children, from the smallest to those who have to use a cane when they walk.

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and access to our full archive and to comments and discussions. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!

Browse Our Archive