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“This is the tragedy of a man who cannot make up his mind,” says the voice at the start of Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948). Somebody should have overruled Larry there. When you are confronted with ambiguity, especially in a matter of a capital crime in high places, and when a spirit comes to you in the shape of your recently deceased father and he urges you to take bloody revenge, you had better hesitate. Let me lay out the main moral problems here.

As everyone in Shakespeare’s audience knew, when it comes to vengeance, we must avoid it as poison, for “vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; I will repay.” The question is not whether someone deserves to die. It is what happens to the soul of the revenger — who takes upon himself privately a responsibility that is public. Tudor and Stuart drama is full of what scholars call “revenge tragedy” — Hamlet is no outlier. You’ve got Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, and many more, including Shakespeare’s own Titus Andronicus, Othello, and Hamlet. That’s not to mention his late plays of wonder and redemption, in which revenge, deserved or undeserved, is not taken: Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest.

You see, what should cause Hamlet to doubt is not just the fact of the matter. He himself is aware of what is at stake, though he draws the wrong conclusion about what would suffice to remove the doubt. “The spirit that I have seen,” he says, thinking of his father’s ghost,

May be a devil, and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very pregnant with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me.

So he determines to have a troup of itinerant actors play before the king and the court a tragedy whose plot will parallel what the king has done, murdering his brother (who was Hamlet’s father) and marrying his sister-in-law (Hamlet’s mother the queen). That’s to shock King Claudius into revealing his bad conscience by surprise. Which in fact does happen. But it is one thing to know that Uncle Claudius is as guilty as hell, and another to take vengeance rather than to bring the law or the whole people of Denmark into the picture. Yes, the devil will tell lies to damn you. But when the truth will do, he will tell the truth, or rather he will cheerfully reveal a fact, using it as the lever you pull to bring destruction on the object of your vengeance, and on yourself.

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Suppose you ask me, “Does Shakespeare intend for us to decide that the Ghost is not really that of Hamlet’s father, but that whether he is or not, he urges upon Hamlet a damnable course of action, and thus he cannot possibly come from anywhere but Hell?” I would answer that I incline that way, though after all these years I am not entirely confident about it. Obviously, the King is guilty and deserves to die. And Hamlet is an imaginative and shrewd man, though prone to brooding melancholy and slow to act. But one of the features of the revenge tragedy is that the vengeance, unlike a case adjudicated at law, tends toward chaos. At the end of the play, everybody important except for Hamlet’s friend Horatio is dead, and Horatio has expressed a desire to commit suicide. The King is guilty, but did the Queen know that he murdered his brother? We don’t know. Polonius, the meddlesome old fool, is dead, but the last time I checked, being a meddlesome old fool is not a capital crime. He has urged upon his daughter Ophelia, whom Hamlet says he loves or once loved, a sneaky course of action, to play hard to get; she does so, and she goes mad after her father is killed by Hamlet, by mistake; and it seems as if in her madness she has drowned herself. Did she deserve to die? If we look at the stage in the final moment, littered with the dead, we see it dominated not by a Dane but by the young Norwegian prince and adventurer, Fortinbras, so that Hamlet’s action has delivered up the nation to a foreign ruler. That’s a lot to consider.

You might suppose that I’m going to give you one of Hamlet’s famous speeches in which he expresses doubt — for instance, “To be, or not to be”, when he wavers about whether to take his own life. But I’m going to engage in my own bit of indirection. I’m giving you Claudius’ monologue, in which he tries to pray. We overhear his words, which Hamlet does not. Hamlet, unseen, will find him there, on his knees. It’s a perfect opportunity to kill the man, but Hamlet decides — and this desire is damnable — that he really wants not just to kill Claudius but to send his soul spinning off to hell. We learn, when Hamlet leaves, that Claudius has been unable to pray, so that Hamlet might as well have killed him; and that makes us ask why Shakespeare included the scene at all, since neither the King’s action nor Hamlet’s has any effect on the plot. The effect on our moral sense, though, is indeed powerful and dubious: we are no longer in doubt as to the King’s guilt, but we are in more doubt than ever about Hamlet’s soul.

Here, then, is the King attempting to pray.

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O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon it,
A brother's murder.  Pray can I not,
Though inclination be as sharp as will.
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent,
And like a man to double business bound
I stand in pause where I shall first begin,
And both neglect.  What if this cursed hand
Where thicker than itself with brother's blood,
Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens
To wash it white as snow?  Whereto serves mercy
But to confront the visage of offense?
And what's in prayer but this twofold force,
To be forestalled ere we come to fall,
Or pardoned being down?  Then I'll look up.
My fault is past.  But, O, what form of prayer
Will serve my turn?  "Forgive me my foul murder"?
That cannot be, since I am still possessed
Of those effects for which I did the murder,
My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen.
Can one be pardoned and retain the offense?
In the corrupted currents of this world
Offense's gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law.  But 'tis not so above.
There is no shuffling; there the action lies
In his true nature, and we ourselves compelled,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults
To give in evidence.  What then?  What rests?
Try what repentance can.  What can it not?
Yet what can it when one cannot repent?
O wretched state!  O bosom black as death!
O limed soul, that struggling to be free
Art more engaged!  Help, angels!  Make assay.
Bow, stubborn knees, and heart with strings of steel,
Be soft as sinews of the newborn babe.
All may be well.

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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When I was writing my book-length poem, The Hundredfold, I set myself a task that shouldn’t surprise our readers here at Word and Song. Now then, The Hundredfold is made up of 100 poems, but they’re not of the same kind. Twelve are dramatic monologues, six from before the Passion and the Resurrection of Jesus, and six from the time immediately after or in the apostolic age. There are 66 lyrics, in some of which I speak in my own voice, plus a 67th lyric set apart at the end as the final and crowning poem, with 100 lines, in Dante’s terza rima, and there I most certainly am speaking right from the heart. But numbered along with the twelve monologues, I’ve written 21 hymns, making 33 in all; so we have a total of 100 poems. That’s just to scratch the surface of the architecture of it all. I figured that if Dante and the Pearl-poet and Spenser and a whole lot of other poets and artists and composers did such things, they’ve got to be of considerable value.

But to the task: I asked myself, “Can you write traditional hymns in English, without syntactic inversions, and without sounding as if you’re mugging Shakespeare, at most availing yourself of the musically and poetically convenient and powerful old second-person singular pronouns (thou, thy and thine, thee)? And by “traditional,” I meant what I said in the strictest sense. See, I would choose from beforehand the melody I wanted to write the hymn to, a traditional melody, so that the words would rise up out of the music, rather than be stuffed and tucked into it. I also knew, from beforehand, exactly how many stanzas each hymn was going to have, and that also meant that I’d have to compose the poem to fit precisely, with what poems ought to have, just as stories do — a beginning, a middle, and an end. When I started, it really was an experiment, and I found that it can certainly be done. You can’t do it really well, though, unless you have English poetry, hymnody, many centuries of hymns, in your mind and heart. A poem that is going to be sung has to be singable, right? Nobody sings an office memorandum. Nobody sings a quarterly earnings report. Nobody even sings the thesis for a theology essay. Some words in English will simply sound ridiculous if you try to sing them; they will sound the way a hippopotamus in a ballet dress would look. But other words almost cry out to be sung: such as our Word of the Week, most fit for the Easter season: glory.

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Now let me say a little about where I placed this particular hymn-poem I’ve chosen for today. It is the fifth of a five-hymn series exactly in the center of The Hundredfold. The series itself is embraced by lyric poems on either side, poems on the Passion and the Resurrection. These have eight stanzas each, with a total of 100 lines and — I kid you not — 800 syllables. Eight, you see, is the number of the Resurrection, Christ having risen on the day after the Sabbath, and that is why so many of the old churches and baptisteries were built octagonally, and Saint Peter notes too, in this same regard, that eight persons were saved in Noah’s ark. Those would be Noah, Mrs. Noah, his three sons, and their wives. But for this final of the five hymns I was pulling out all the stops — and I mean that literally, because the melody I chose is the mighty Christ Lag in Todesbanden (Christ lay in the bonds of death), the melody for Bach’s first sacred cantata.

The stanzas are difficult, as you’ll see. Counting the syllables, as you do when you’re composing a hymn, they are 8-7-8-7-8-8-8, first four lines trochaic (DUM-da), last three lines iambic (da-DUM), followed by an Alleluia. The lines must rhyme ABCB DDD — ending on a rhyming triplet, with all its possibilities for climax, summation, or surprising reversal in the final line. The movement from stanza to stanza is thus: from Calvary, to earth and Eden lost, to earth and Eden regained, to the old and new Jerusalem, and then, finally, to hell defeated and plundered, and the Paradise of heaven. And for all this, there are lines in the poem that, though they’re meant to apply to all believers, come straight from my heart, and the ideas and the feelings that prompt them are impossible for me to describe.

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From the field of final battle
   Christ arises, glory-crowned.
Where Death shook his iron scepter
    Life and liberty abound.
The chains of sin with power to draw,
The long-contracted brow of law,
Yield to His majesty and awe: Alleluia.

Man, from ease and Eden driven,
   Delves his grave with every breath;
Labors in the field, and harvests
   Fruit that tastes of ash and death.
Such is Man's fare, but only He
Who sowed the world can raise the Tree
Whose fruit is for eternity: Alleluia.

Heralds of the new creation,
   Vanguard of the risen Lord,
Sing out with the sons of Adam,
   Sing, and sheathe the flaming sword.
No more ye need to stand on guard
Against mankind from Eden barred,
For they are hastening heavenward: Alleluia.

The once desolated city
   Gleams in gladness as a bride;
Wells of darkness flash with water
   Flowing from the Temple's side.
The Lamb has set a diadem
Of light and every lightsome gem
Upon His spouse, Jerusalem: Alleluia.

We shall praise the Lamb triumphant
   Who has crushed the gates of hell,
Taken sinners bound, and brought them
   Where His sons in freedom dwell.
What dust or darkness shuts our eyes?
With Christ our light our hearts arise,
For He has opened Paradise: Alleluia.

© Anthony Esolen, all rights reserved. Do not use this hymn without the express written permission of the author.

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It is Holy Week, and I’ve decided for our Poem of the Week to go to C. S. Lewis’s favorite English poet, Edmund Spenser. I mean by “favorite” that he was most warmly moved by Spenser’s work, not that he thought Spenser was greater than Shakespeare or Milton — though he was well aware that Spenser was great indeed. People used to call him “the poet’s poet,” for the mellifluousness of his verse and for the variety and the ease of his imagination, which I trust you’ll hear in today’s selection.

First let me set the stage. Spenser liked to play on a kind of self-deprecating irony, sometimes as if he were a simple shepherd piping a song to his harvest queen, sometimes as if he were at his wits’ end as to how to continue with his narrative, and sometimes as if he were writing with a lesser motive and with modest skill, when actually he is reaching for the heights and expects us to be aware of that. Such is the case here. The work is called Four Hymns: a hymn of love (whose main figure is Cupid), a hymn of beauty (Venus), a hymn of heavenly love (Jesus), and a hymn of heavenly beauty (Wisdom, portrayed as the queen of heaven, seated in the bosom of God). Spenser says in the letter he appends to the beginning that he wrote the first two hymns “in the greener times of my youth,” but that he was worried that his fellow youths had been too carried away by their passion, so to correct for the wrong, he has added the last two hymns “of heavenly and celestial beauty.” Well, that’s Spenser poking us in the ribs, and saying, “Pay close attention, because the four hymns here are all related to one another. There’s nothing the least bit salacious or even salty in the first two. They’re meant to lead you on the ascent from earthly love and beauty to heavenly love and beauty, because heaven is both their wellspring and their aim.” For love, even earthly love, he says in the first of his hymns,

is Lord of truth and loyalty,
Lifting himself out of the lowly dust
On golden plumes up to the purest sky,
Above the reach of loathly sinful lust.

Cupid’s arrow sure does hurt, but in chaste hearts it’s a wound that raises them up to heroic deeds, and to the Paradise of delight.

It’s easy, then, to follow up the Hymn to Love with a Hymn to Beauty, with Venus as the figure — and in art and poetry, in philosophy and theology, Venus, we should understand, had two forms, one earthly, one heavenly. It’s the latter that Spenser has in mind, the beauty that raises us beyond ourselves, even to contemplation of the whole created universe and its orderly pattern, which, he says,

Is perfect Beauty which all men adore,
Whose face and feature doth so much excel
All mortal sense, that none the same may tell.

Again, let me make clear — those lines are from the Hymn to Beauty, not the Hymn to Heavenly Beauty. So if we expect to ascend from this point, where can we go? Spenser surprises us, in the Hymn to Heavenly Love, by returning us to earth, in the person of Jesus.

But that’s not before he sets us before all time and all created things, in the begetting of the Son:

That high eternal power, which now doth move
In all these things, moved in itself by love.

Then comes the creation of the angels in their “trinal triplicities,” and of all this universe, and of man made in God’s image,

In whom he might his mighty self behold,
For love doth love the thing beloved to see
That like itself in lovely shape may be.

But man fell from grace, and from pure love the Son came among us in the flesh, to suffer and to die in atonement for our sins. That’s where our passage begins.

One small but I think fascinating point. Spenser has set up his Four Hymns in a double-interlocking structure. Two belong to earth, though they direct our eyes and our hearts to heaven — the first two. Two belong to heaven, though they pour out their love and their wisdom upon the earth — the second two. The first in each pair is devoted to love; the second, to beauty. Thus they are like the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire, with their interlaced relations. For earth is cold and dry, water is cold and moist, air is warm and moist, and fire is warm and dry. As those four dance in a ring, so Spenser’s Four Hymns are meant to show forth a world embracing both heaven and earth, a world of love and beauty.

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

Out of the bosom of eternal bliss
In which he reigned with his glorious Sire,
He down descended, like a most demiss
And abject thrall, in flesh's frail attire,
That he for man might pay sin's deadly hire,
And him restore unto that happy state
In which he stood before his hapless fate.

In flesh at first the guilt committed was,
Therefore in flesh it must be satisfied:
Nor spirit, nor angel, though they man surpass,
Could make amends to God for man's disguide,
But only man himself, who self did slide.
So taking flesh of virgin's sacred womb,
For man's dear sake he did a man become.

And that most blessed body, which was born
Without all blemish or reproachful blame,
He freely gave to be both rent and torn
Of cruel hands, who with despiteful shame
Reviling him, that them most vile became,
At length him nailed on a gallow tree,
And slew the just by most unjust decree.

O huge and most unspeakable impression
Of love's deep wound, that pierced the piteous heart
Of that dear Lord with so entire affection,
And sharply launching every inner part,
Dolors of death into his soul did dart,
Doing him die, that never it deserved,
To free his foes that from his hest had swerved.

What heart can feel least touch of so sore launch,
Or thought can think the depth of so dear wound?
Whose bleeding source their streams yet never staunch
But still do flow, and freshly still redound
To heal the sores of sinful souls unsound,
And cleanse the guilt of that infected crime
Which was enrooted in all fleshly slime.

O blessed well of love, O flower of grace,
O glorious Morning star, O lamp of light,
Most lively image of thy Father's face,
Eternal King of glory, Lord of might,
Meek Lamb of God before all worlds behight,
How can we thee requite for all this good?
Or what can prize that thy most precious blood?

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Every virtue, I used to tell my students, is a dynamism, a power, and if that is so, and if compassion is a power, what is its characteristic action? How does it express itself? Our author today, one you’ll recognize as a favorite here at Word and Song, William Wordsworth, would see compassion as inseparable from the imagination in its deepest heart of hearts. Let’s think about this a moment. Another of our favorites, the poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, he also a tireless laborer on behalf of the poor, would go for walks in the countryside and notice things — or more than notice them; he sought to open his mind up to what he called their “inscape,” the world inside them, what makes them the things they are. Man is the single creature in our world whose mind and heart rush forth to enter into those other things, the snaggled apple tree, the white to pink blossoms so prominent against the bare bark, the redbreast gleaning the grubs — “all things original, counter, spare, strange,” as he says. Or as Wordsworth’s friend, the brilliant Coleridge wrote:

He prayeth best who loveth best
All creatures great and small,
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

And we may think of that man who was all compassion, who saw the kingdom of God in the mustard seed, and a little bit of yeast; who regarded the lilies of the field, and the birds of the air, and loved them, as he loved the hills and the mountains.

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So in our poem, Wordsworth gives us a boy who liked to do a boyish thing. He would go into the woods after the sun had set, and make a sound with his mouth and his hands that mimicked the call of the owls, so that they would respond to him. But when they were silent again, he heard things, or experienced them — what he didn’t go out for, but they came to him and he was open to them; the far rush of a mountain stream, or the solemn silence of rocks and hills. “He was just a boy!” the skeptic might say. Just? And it was just the whole mysterious world he was feeling.

But the poem doesn’t end there. The boy died before he saw his twelfth birthday. And it’s the poet now who stands near the village school and the church, and on summer evenings he has visited the boy’s grave — we don’t know that he has any special reason to do so, or if so, what the reason might be, other than that in the boy he finds a kindred spirit. Or perhaps he himself was one of those boys in that village, and he remembers his old playfellow. He doesn’t say. But he says sometimes he’s spent a half an hour at once, just being there. So the poet too has this power, this movement of the heart outward toward things, and especially toward someone who called with the owls, and walked in the hills when night was falling. Coleridge said of the lines that end the first stanza, “I should have recognized them anywhere; and had I met these lines running wild in the deserts of Arabia, I should have instantly screamed out, ‘Wordsworth’!”

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There was a Boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs
And islands of Winander! -- many a time,
At evening, when the earliest stars began
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would he stand alone,
Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake;
And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands
Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls
That they might answer him.—  And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call,— with quivering peals,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of jocund din!  And, when there came a pause
Of silence such as baffled his best skill:
Then sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.

This boy was taken from his mates, and died
In childhood, ere he was full twelve years old.
Pre-eminent in beauty is the vale
Where he was born and bred: the churchyard hangs
Upon a slope above the village-school;
And through that churchyard when my way has led
On summer evenings, I believe that there
A long half-hour together I have stood
Mute — looking at the grave in which he lies!

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I’m looking at a copy of Yeats’ volume, published in 1903 by the small press he, his sister Elizabeth, and their friend Evelyn Gleeson established, Dun Emer — that is, Emer’s Bluff. Emer (modern Irish Eimhear) was the wife of the mythical hero of Irish legend, Cu Chulainn, literally Cullen’s Dog, not a lap-dog but a ferocious and loyal dog, so his name means Cullen’s Warrior or the Cullen-Warrior. At the top of the page where this first poem appears, these words appear all in red capitals: “IN THE SEVEN WOODS: BEING POEMS CHIEFLY OF THE IRISH HEROIC AGE.” So we shouldn’t be surprised that the title poem takes us away from current strife, but not to a nostalgic hideaway. It’s not a retreat that the poet is on, but a return, a return to that heroic past. The heroism, too, is not gone forever. It bides its time, he suggests. And he would be right about that, after all. The Irish would rise up and win their independence, and Yeats would live to see it.

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A couple of things to help you out with this short poem. It’s written in a loose blank verse, that is, unrhymed iambic pentameter. The “new commonness” on the throne is surely Edward VII of England, who succeeded his mother Queen Victoria at her death in 1901; the poem itself is dated August, 1902. “Tara” again is the royal site of the ancient Irish kings: that is where Saint Patrick himself went to speak to King Lóegaire, and eventually won him over, whether the king encouraged him to preach, or became himself a follower of Christ. The paper flowers on the lampposts in the city streets are pretty paltry by comparison with the blossoms on the lime trees — those are linden trees, with their abundance of tiny white and green flowers when they are in bloom. The scent is powerful and pleasant, and the bees love them, and they make for great honey. The word linden was originally an adjective, from the noun lind, as in the old-fashioned adjectives oaken, beechen, and birchen. And who is the Great Archer? Yeats doesn’t help us here. We may think of God, but we may also think of the zodiacal sign Sagittarius, that is, the Archer: the constellation would be easily seen in the southern sky in spring, rising shortly after dark, though at Ireland’s latitude it would be low in the sky, so you can imagine that bowman aiming his arrow right down at Ireland. He’s got a “cloudy quiver,” because you can see a part of the Milky Way within the constellation and nearby.

But, all that said, it’s best to hear the poem, lovely and mysterious as it is, and let your imagination take over.

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I have heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods 
Make their faint thunder, and the garden bees 
Hum in the lime tree flowers; and put away 
The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness 
That empty the heart. I have forgot awhile 
Tara uprooted, and new commonness 
Upon the throne and crying about the streets 
And hanging its paper flowers from post to post,
Because it is alone of all things happy.
I am contented for I know that Quiet 
Wanders laughing and eating her wild heart
Among pigeons and bees, while that Great Archer, 
Who but awaits His hour to shoot, still hangs 
A cloudy quiver over Parc-na-Lee.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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So what does this have to do with poetry? Quite a lot! I sense that teachers — especially those who cut their teeth on modernist poetry without rhyme or meter — are so worried that their students won’t be able to make heads or tails of a sentence in poetry, they miss teaching them how to listen to the music. And if we’re talking about free verse, there sometimes isn’t any grammatical sense, or even any music — but that’s another matter. Walt Whitman wrote free verse, but he was always musical. Whether or not you like what he does or feel for what he says, he’d cut his teeth on the music of European poetry going back to Greece and Rome, so even when he’s writing free verse you often hear the rolling thunder of the old epic meter just beneath it. Anyway, it’s as important to hear the music of a poem (and poetry ought to be musical, in a broad sense) as it is to furrow your brow over the symbols and the metaphors. By the way, it’s one reason why Debra and I can’t stand the jiggering that editors do with old hymns. Meaning aside, changing thee to you is like somebody saying, “Oh, don’t have the flutes play that measure. Use the tuba instead.” Hey, that ain’t the same thing.

Now, for today’s Poem of the Week, thinking of our key word, favor, I have a haunting passage from Milton’s Paradise Lost. The scene is this. Adam and Eve have eaten the fruit; they have felt the shame of their sin; they have blamed each other, estranged and in enmity; they have been judged, firmly but mildly, by the Son of God; they have wept and been near to despair; but God has sown contrition in their hearts, and they are now reconciled to one another in love and sorrow. Eve has suggested to Adam that they remain childless, so that the curse of death will end with them, but Adam has rejected the suggestion, thinking hard, trying to remember the promise that the Son has also given, that the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s head. He also remembers the mild and gracious temper of the Son when he judged them, the favor that shone in his face, so he recommends that they trust God, weep for their wrongdoing, and pray for mercy.

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Here’s the musical question I want to ask. What Milton does here at the very end of Book 10 is pretty daring. First, Adam recommends to Eve that they do what I’ve mentioned. Second, he gives the great reason why they should be confident. Third, Milton, in his own voice, describes what Adam and Eve do, using almost exactly the same words, the same clauses, the same rhythm of phrasing, that Adam has just used — daring to repeat himself, seven whole lines. How can he get away with that?

Or rather, what has he just done, stunning us in so doing? What do you feel is the musical effect of it — and I mean also the dramatic effect, as if we were at an opera, and the repetition was integral to the moment? I’m really asking how it strikes you. I know, when we’re talking or thinking about not just what words mean, but how they sound, and not just one word here or there, but seven lines together, it may be hard for us to be precise about it, but the power of all great art far transcends precision. As for me, I think the effect is solemn and quiet, rather like the end of Bach’s oratorio, Jesu, Meine Freude, whose last line is the first one repeated, but after so much has come between — in English, “Jesu, priceless treasure.”

So then, tell us what you hear — what you feel.

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          ". . . Such fire to use,
And what may else be remedy or cure
To evils which our own misdeeds have brought,
He will instruct us praying, and of grace
Beseeching him, so as we need not fear
To pass commodiously this life, sustained
By him with many comforts, till we end
In dust, our final rest and native home.
What better can we do than to the place
Repairing where he judged us, prostrate fall
Before him reverent, and there confess
Humbly our faults, and pardon beg, with tears
Watering the ground, and with our sighs the air
Frequenting, sent from hearts contrite, in sign
Of sorrow unfeigned, and humiliation meek.
Undoubtedly he will relent and turn
From his displeasure, in whose look serene,
When angry most he seemed and most severe,
What else but favor, grace, and mercy shone?"
     So spake our father penitent, nor Eve
Felt less remorse; they forthwith to the place
Repairing where he judged them, prostrate fell
Before him reverent, and both confessed
Humbly their faults, and pardon begged, with tears
Watering the ground, and with their sighs the air
Frequenting, sent from hearts contrite, in sign
Of sorrow unfeigned, and humiliation meek.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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In the first selection, the poet is standing on the shore, watching, as the ship comes into harbor, carrying the body of his deceased friend. He compares his tears to those of a widower who dreams of his beloved, and half asleep vaguely reaches for her familiar form, but she is not there. And yet, when the ship approaches, so strange it all seems to him, that he cannot half believe it; he can almost imagine that the ship is just bringing merchants’ goods, nothing more. Now then, is such a poet “all ear”? We might rather call him all heart, and a heart for a deeply honest and considerate mind. And lest we doubt his feelings, we should keep in mind that in the time before the brain-distractions of mass media, friendship could be most powerful indeed, and in Tennyson’s case, his friendship with Arthur Hallam was made more profound in that the two were going to become brothers, bound by their love for Emily, Tennyson with his brother-love for a younger sister, and Arthur with his love for a beautiful, intelligent, and gentle woman, the sister of his friend.

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In the second selection, Tennyson notices the difference between two expressions of grief, two kinds of tears. The first kind can be expressed in words. They are like the servants in a household where the master, who has just died, lies in state. They loved him, no doubt of that. But they sum up their sorrow by saying that it will be hard to get another situation as good as the one they have just lost. But the grief that cannot be expressed? They are like the children who sit in stunned silence.

And here I had better let the poet’s words speak for themselves.

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XIII
Tears of the widower, when he sees
   A late-lost form that sleep reveals,
   And moves his doubtful arms, and feels
Her place is empty, fall like these;

Which weep a loss forever new,
   A void where heart on heart reposed,
   And, where warm hearts have pressed and closed,
Silence, till I be silent too.

Which weep the comrade of my choice,
   An awful thought, a life removed,
   The human-hearted man I loved,
A spirit, not a breathing voice.

Come Time, and teach me many years
   I do not suffer in a dream;
   For now so strange do these things seem,
Mine eyes have leisure for their tears;

My fancies time to rise on wing,
   And glance about the approaching sails,
   As though they brought but merchants' bales,
And not the burthen that they bring.

XX
The lesser griefs that may be said,
   That breathe a thousand tender woes,
   Are but as servants in a house
Where lies the master newly dead;

Who speak their feeling as it is,
   And weep the fullness from the mind:
   "It will be hard," they say, "to find
Another service such as this."

My lighter moods are like to these,
   That out of words a comfort win;
   But there are other griefs within,
And tears that at their fountain freeze;

For by the hearth the children sit
   Cold in that atmosphere of Death,
   And scarce endure to draw the breath,
Or like to noiseless phantoms flit:

But open converse is there none,
   So much the vital spirits sink
   To see the vacant chair, and think,
"How good!  how kind!  and he is gone."

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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I suppose that there are two basic ways to err in dealing with that certainty. Both are born of fear. One is to be morbidly preoccupied with it. The other is to flee all thought of it. In our time, that dread is exacerbated by our experiences with hospitals, where we seem to lose our humanity. My grandfather, when he was dying, refused to be taken to the hospital. My father also died at home, surrounded by his family. I don’t want the last thing I see on earth to be ceiling tiles.

But it is healthy to prepare, long beforehand, for the time that will come, inevitably, and that’s what our poet this week, George Herbert, is doing in this poem, “Church Monuments.” The speaker is a pastor, and the scene is a churchyard — the cemetery, on the church grounds. He is thinking not of any particular person buried there, but of dust and earth: and we may remember here the Ash Wednesday adjuration: “Remember, Man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.” Sin — our “crimes,” as he says — feeds the “incessant motion” of death, and drives us all to our graves. What we should do, then, is let meditation upon death set us to school. What elements are we made of? See the dust and earth. Should you read the lines engraved on the monuments, to denote who lies there? The “dusty heraldry and lines” are not on the stone but in the earth. They “laugh at Jet and Marble” — that is, they laugh at black obsidian or bright marble. The engravings tell us who lies there, but what good will they be when the monuments themselves “bow, and kneel, and fall down flat / To kiss those heaps which now they have in trust”? Then the dust of the stones will lie flat upon the dust of the earth and the dust of the bodies. Even the stones cry out to us, “We too must pass away!”

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But Herbert saves the most daring metaphor for last. Think of the dust of an hourglass, sifting away, inevitably dwindling: that’s what the poet says our flesh is. My body is glass through which the sands of time fall away; and even the glass itself will fall to dust. Consider how tame the ashes are in the grave, he says, and learn the lesson, to “fit thyself against thy fall,” meaning, to get ready, to be in trim for the fall that must come; or, with a different sense to the preposition “against,” to fit yourself against or in opposition to the fall. The two meanings are in accord.

Notice, too, that there are two words that dominate the poem: dust and earth. Dust is one of the rhyming words in stanzas 1, 3, and 4, rhyming on trust in the first two, and rhyming as we might say against the word lust in the last stanza. In the second stanza, we have the word earth in place of dust, as a rhyming word, rhyming with birth, and that too is quite deliberate. We aren’t to despise the flesh. Herbert calls it “dear,” meaning cherished, even precious; and he isn’t being ironic there. We must believe that it is only earth. But it is also to be raised up again, in the new heaven and new earth. For sometimes dust is not charcoal. Sometimes it is gold.

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While that my soul repairs to her devotion,
Here I entomb my flesh, that it betimes
May take acquaintance of this heap of dust,
To which the blast of death's incessant motion,
Fed with the exhalation of our crimes,
Drives all at last.  Therefore I gladly trust

My body to this school, that it may learn
To spell his elements, and find his birth
Written in dusty heraldry and lines,
Which dissolution sure doth best discern,
Comparing dust with dust and earth with earth.
These laugh at Jet, and Marble put for signs

To sever the good fellowship of dust
And spoil the meeting.  What shall point out them
When they shall bow and kneel and fall down flat
To kiss those heaps, which now they have in trust?
Dear flesh, while I do pray, learn here thy stem
And true descent; that when thou shalt grow fat

And wanton in thy cravings, thou mayst know
That flesh is but the glass which holds the dust
That measures all our time; which also shall
Be crumbled into dust.  Mark here below
How tame these ashes are, how free from lust,
That thou mayst fit thyself against thy fall.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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I don’t dispute that Napoleon was a great man, if by that adjective you mean that he achieved mighty works and changed the course of human history. But the author of our Poem of the Week, William Wordsworth, demurs. In his youth, Wordsworth was once a champion of Napoleon, but he began to have second thoughts — Wordsworth grew more conservative as he grew older, by which I mean that he put less and less trust in political action, as was only to be expected, I think, from someone whose deepest influences came from his experiences among the common people of the Lake District when he was a boy. We’ve featured Wordsworth here before, and if you’d like a look at what I consider one of the profoundest poems on the invaluable worth of the lowliest among us, see The Old Cumberland Beggar.

I guess it’s no accident that Wordsworth’s nephew, Christopher Wordsworth, himself a poet and a writer of hymns, became an Anglican bishop: see his mighty Songs of Thankfulness and Praise. What humility does is to open the mind and heart to greatness: I think of Isaac Newton, comparing himself, as Saint Augustine did, to a little boy playing with pebbles on the shore of the ocean. Humility thus is related also to gratitude, the willingness to accept a gift, and to give oneself to it; in its ultimate form, man’s free and joyful submission to the grace of God.

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The poem is a sonnet, and Wordsworth wrote about 500 of them in the course of his long life. Many of them are splendid indeed. He did more than write them: he studied them carefully, as works of a particular form of art. Most sonnets divide nicely after the 8th line, which the Italians called the volta, or turn. You make a point or you set a scene, and then you turn on it, or apply it, or amplify it, or consider it more acutely. Milton, Wordsworth saw, didn’t always do that, but let the octave bleed over into the sestet, binding them more closely. And then, how do you rhyme? Shakespeare’s sonnets end in a separate couplet, so you might say that he’s got a 12-2 structure along with the 8-6. But the Italians didn’t favor that, and English sonneteers who followed them, like Philip Sidney, also played with how the last 6 lines should rhyme and in what order, to achieve a variety of musical effects.

Wordsworth chooses here a structure that continues the music of the octave, but then rounds it off in a quiet but decisive manner. The octave rhymes ABBA ABBA, and that’s not easy to do, because you’ve got only two rhyming sounds to cover 8 lines. He changes the rhymes once the sestet begins, but it’s again a mirror-structure, CDDC, the inner lines rhyming with each other on one sound, and the outer lines on another. But for the last two lines, he doesn’t give us a couplet, which might strike like a sledge-hammer, but instead the same two sounds, DC. He also makes sure that the lines from 10 to 13 do not coincide with complete clauses, which serves also to soften the rhymes, and to make the lines sound as if they were meditative, even conversational, though conversation of a sober and considerate kind. Notice also the repeated use of the word “doth,” in the final two lines. They aren’t there to fill up a syllable. Wordsworth could easily have written “by which true Rulers mount,” and “this is the stalk / True Power must grow on,” and we would never suspect another alternative. But the archaic word quietly sets the poem in the realm of the Biblical; and it does so without the slightest allusion to Scripture. So too, in a slightly more pointed way, does the word “degrees,” bringing to mind the “songs of degrees” that some of the Psalms are: they were sung as the priests ascended the stairs of the Temple. True Sway mounts the stairs of meekness. Such language, subtle and unobtrusive, is yet Wordsworth’s way of saying, “This truth I express is a law of human life. It always was, and it always will be.”

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I grieved for Buonaparte, with a vain
And an unthinking grief!  The tenderest mood
Of that Man's mind -- what can it be?  what food
Fed his first hopes?  what knowledge could he gain?
'Tis not in battles that from youth we train
The Governor who must be wise and good,
And temper with the sternness of the brain
Thoughts motherly, and meek as womanhood.
Wisdom doth live with children round her knees:
Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk
Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk
Of the mind's business: these are the degrees
By which true Sway doth mount; this is the stalk
True Power doth grow on; and her rights are these.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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You’d not be surprised to hear that Shakespeare is the most frequently quoted of our English poets. In Hamlet alone there are about 40 that have entered common parlance. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” “Ay, there’s the rub.” “What a piece of work is man.” “Good night, sweet Prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” We can go on and on. But if there’s anyone second to Shakespeare, it’s Alexander Pope, and today we’ve got what might be his best-known line of all: “A little learning is a dangerous thing.”

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What makes Pope’s poetry so memorable? His lines, usually in what we call “heroic couplets,” that is, rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter, are chiseled finely, sanded, and buffed to a high polish. All is clean and clear, easy of access, but also highly wrought; think of a neo-classical home, like Monticello, or a classical temple, like the Pantheon, or Christopher Wren’s magnificent cathedral of St. Paul’s, in London.

Yet Pope is so good at what he does, he may fool you into thinking that his lines are easier than they are. For all his art, he seems to speak naturally, and why not? He himself says, in another famous couplet, and from the same poem we’ve got today, that “True Wit is Nature to advantage dressed: / What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” But if you look more closely, you’ll see how he places his pauses in deliberate places in the middle of a line, or how he balances one image or motif with another, or how he will end a series of sinewy and even dissonant lines with a line of absolute lucidity, as the climax. Reading Pope with attention, you will experience the very thing he describes in our passage: the further you go, the more you learn, and the more you learn, the more you see that what you have learned is still but little.

There are, I guess, three ways to react to this experience. One is to deny it or to run from it. “I don’t want to hear it!” cries the student who wants to rest with “a little Learning.” Things are easier that way, and you might even graduate from college with plenty of A’s, telling your professors what they want to hear, not always because you’re deceiving them, but because they themselves may have settled for “a little Learning,” and you find it comfortable to go along and believe the same. The second way is to surrender, and say, “There’s no end to it! This is as far as I can go.” That may not always be the result of laziness or cowardice. You may reach the limit of your ability. Or you may discover that to go on requires a commitment and a passion you don’t have. Not everybody can do the crazy thing I’m doing these days — I’m memorizing Paradise Lost, and I’ve got about 93% of it by heart. That’s over 9800 lines, with about 750 to go. Not everybody can do it, but who would want to do it? But the best reaction of all is gratitude mingled with excitement.

Sure, we can and we do get tired, and we need to take a rest even from those things that stir our minds and strike our eyes with wonder. Even Michelangelo had to rest sometime from his labor, if only to write great sonnets. Even Thomas Edison had to sleep, which he often did for four hours a night, on a table in his laboratory. But in the end, I’m very happy that there’s more for me to learn, and more, and always more; things that are beautiful, even just things that are good fun. I think it is an earnest of heaven itself.

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A little Learning is a dangerous Thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fired at first Sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless Youth we tempt the Heights of Arts;
While from the bounded Level of our Mind,
Short Views we take, nor see the Lengths behind,
But more advanced, behold with strange Surprise
New, distant scenes of endless Science rise!
So pleased at first, the towering Alps we try,
Mount o'er the Vales, and seem to tread the Sky;
Th' Eternal Snows appear already past,
And the first Clouds and Mountains seem the last:
But those attained, we tremble to survey
The growing Labors of the lengthened Way,
Th' increasing Prospect tires our wandering Eyes,
Hills peep o'er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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I’ve often said that if it weren’t for Debra, I’d be living under a bridge somewhere. That’s because a man works for his family, either the family he has or the family he plans on having. Otherwise, there seems to be little point in it. Since he can put up with living on the edge between utter poverty and civilization, it’s where he may well end up, and not be too broken up about it, either. I’m sure our readers can think of examples from their own experience, too. And that brings us to our Poem of the Week, by the greatest of all American poets, Robert Frost, a man who had winter in his name and a wintry tenderness in his soul. It’s about an old man living alone, apparently in the middle of nowhere.

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I don’t mean to be sentimental about the old man, and Frost was no sentimentalist, either. And it isn’t the most comfortable thing in the world right now, to write about loneliness. I used to tell my students that, for all that I could tell, there was no word in Middle English to describe that feeling. Why should there be? There were words for all other kinds of woe, but not for that one. My guess is that the feeling was unknown. You had your family, your parish, your neighbors, the other men in your guild if you belonged to one, the other sharecroppers on the manor — basically, you weren’t alone, because you couldn’t be. When you spend most of your time outdoors, too, as people did then, especially during the period of continental warming for three hundred years of good harvests (roughly 1000-1300), you’re not hidden away, and a lot of the work to be done couldn’t be managed by a single man here and a single man there.

But one of the odd results of the industrial revolution is that it made it possible to survive all by yourself, and not in the woods or under a bridge, and that means that many people do so. Not well — but they do. And so we have an old man in a New England winter, alone in his house. It’s not clear whether he has electricity at all. Probably not; he carries a small lamp about with him, probably an oil-lamp. But he has glass windows, and no doubt he has plenty of cans of food in the pantry or the cellar, and if he wants he can get loaves of bread from the general store, or dried beans and peas, or tinned meat.

Now, when it comes to precisely describing the details of physical labor, no English poet comes close to Robert Frost, whether it’s baling hay, or picking apples, or working at a grindstone, or milling wood, mowing grass, mending a stone wall, cording wood, even digging a grave. Yet in this poem, set in winter, he gives us an old man who has plenty of work to do, but doesn’t do any of it that we hear of right now. It’s as if Frost is keeping a tactful distance from the very character he himself has invented. We aren’t privy to the old man’s feelings. We aren’t told why he went down into the room full of barrels, and even he can’t remember at first — and hasn’t that happened to you, too, that you go somewhere in the house and then you say, “What am I doing here?” The sounds, too — outdoors they roar or they crack, they’re the wind in the trees or the branches in the cold, but indoors it’s only the clomp-clomp of the man’s feet on the stairs or the floor, like somebody “beating on a box.”

What’s to keep? The snow on the roof, the icicles hanging from the eaves; and the old man leaves them to the moon to see to. He falls asleep before the hearth. What does he need? Is it a woman he needs? Frost doesn’t say so, but I think it’s implicit. He’s just “one aged man — one man,” one, not two, and man, man without woman and so without someone to work for, and someone to keep his house. Alone, he can’t do it, or won’t even try very hard, won’t have the heart for it; and the same for the farm and for the countryside.

The poem is gentle and honest. Can people in our time understand it? I think so — but I don’t know if Frost ever suspected that a time would come when such people living alone would number in the many millions, both men and women, and not only the aged, either.

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All out-of-doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him — at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off — and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon — such as she was,
So late-arising — to the broken moon,
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man — one man — can’t keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It's thus he does it of a winter night.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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Even people who don’t know anything about Scripture, I think, know about the Christmas story, that Mary and Joseph were traveling to Bethlehem, and Mary was with child and the day of her delivery was fast approaching, but when they sought a place to stay, there was no room for them in the inn. So they stayed in the stable, and there Jesus was born, with the animals nearby, and they laid him in a manger for his bed — a wooden feeding trough.

People have tried to make something political about it, but that’s to divert attention from the profound meaning of the event. According to the evangelist, there would have been a lot of people on the road just then, because the Roman authorities had called for a census, for the purposes of taxation. So it’s not as if the innkeeper was hard of heart; and a stable — perhaps a shallow cave or a place cut into the rock on a hillside — might have been comfortable enough for people used to a humble life. But there you see the startling contrast. On one side you have Rome, the ruler of a vast empire built on efficiency, law and order, great works of civil engineering, and bloodshed, with enough cruelty on occasion to keep people timid. On the other side, you have a carpenter, his wife, some animals in a stall, some nearby shepherds, and a little baby boy. Nobody knew it at the time. Even Saint Luke did not know it. But Rome that had never lost a war was going to be conquered by that child. Yet even if there had been no Rome at all, the birth of Jesus would have been as it was, a stealth invasion into conquered territory: the Son of God, taking on human flesh, to batter down the walls that sinful man had built about his heart, to keep mortality in and immortal love out.

So we are apt to hug ourselves and say that if Jesus came among us now, we would certainly give him a better place to be born in than a stable. But who is the needy? Who is weary and in desperate need of the inn? That’s the question that our Poem of the Week asks. When it comes to that, it doesn’t matter whether we live under an empire or a monarchy or a democratic republic. It doesn’t matter whether we are rich or poor. I see in my mind’s eye the late afternoon traffic on Interstate 80, outside of New York City, piling up so badly, because we don’t take nearly as good care of our roads as the Romans did of theirs, cars full of people weary from work, weary from traveling to and from work, and weary from something else that might surprise us. I have put it this way, in The Twelve-Gated City: “Exhausted, from pursuit of happiness.”

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Is the child Jesus, in the womb of Mary, on the road? Our poet George Herbert turns the tables: I am on the road. Not only is the speaker on the road; he hardly knows where he is at all. Is the child in desperate need of lodging? It’s I who have nowhere to lay my head. Are we all set up to welcome Jesus among us? Jesus rather is waiting for us finally to come to his inn. Do we have a place for him? He not only has a place for us: He is the place.

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That’s just in the first eight lines of the sonnet. The last six lines are a petition. So far, Herbert has said nothing at all about Christmas. In the petition we turn to it, and again with a surprise. Says the speaker to Jesus, if I may paraphrase, since you once “stole into a manger,” wrapped in the swaddling clothes of night, then you may do the same with my soul. It’s dark, just as the stable was. It’s brutish too, not with the innocence of animals, but with the debasement of sin. But it is yours by right. If you could be friendly to the cattle and the sheep, then be no stranger to me.

And we are still in for a surprise. In the last two lines, which are the heart of the six-line sentence, the speaker asks Jesus to “furnish and deck” his soul, so that Jesus will have “a better lodging than a rack, or grave.” Think of it. The two lodgings that mankind gave to the Son of God: the first, a cave and a rack for the cattle to eat hay from; the second, a tomb cut into the rock. Jesus alone makes the fit dwelling place. Without him, we have no rest. On our own, we dismiss him and ignore him, or we put him to death. His is the work: and unless he works, even our rest will be exhaustion.

Profoundly moving — but the poem doesn’t end there! What follows is a bright and rousing Christmas song — which I’ll save for next time.

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All after pleasures as I rode one day,
My horse and I both tired, body and mind,
With full cry of affections, quite astray,
I took up at the next inn I could find.

There when I came, whom found I but my dear,
My dearest Lord, expecting till the grief
Of pleasures drew me to him, ready there
To be all passengers' most sweet relief.

O Thou whose glorious yet contracted light,
Wrapped in night's mantle, stole into a manger:
Since my dark soul and brutish is Thy right,
To man of all beasts be not Thou a stranger;

Furnish and deck my soul, that Thou mayst have
A better lodging than a rack, or grave.

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Our Word of the Week is that mysterious name, Emmanuel, which means With-us [is] GOD, so I’ve chosen for our Poem of the Week a sonnet that looks upon the mystery that it names. As I’ve said, the ‘Immanu- part of the name can suggest something quite personal and powerful: just as you might think of someone standing at your side, facing the enemy, strengthening your resolve, protecting you when you falter, inspiring you with confidence and courage. So far, if we are talking about God, we are speaking in profoundly spiritual terms, but who could ever have suspected that God would come among us in the flesh? Advent is the season of anticipation, when we look forward to seeing our Redeemer, as the wonderful verses in Job have it: “For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth,” and “in my flesh I shall see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another.” We read this as a foreshadowing of life eternal — but between the night of this world and that heavenly vision, the first Advent comes, though no one on earth knows it but Mary and Joseph. That Advent, that time of anticipation, lasted nine months, when Christ was with us, and in the flesh, but still unseen; whose life Mary could feel within her.

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Can you “hold infinity in the palm of your hand,” as the poet Blake said? Whether or not the human mind can do so, God can and has done so, present in his infinity and totality in the mustard seed, in the grain of wheat, in the germ of yeast. But when Jesus sheltered in the womb of Mary, it was as a human and divine Person, from the first moment of his conception. Then did the womb of Mary become, as today’s poet John Donne shows us, a “cloister,” a garden enclosed, a paradise of Eden, in space but a “little room” — which, by the way, is what the Italian word “stanza” signifies — and yet containing “immensity.” We’ve got to understand precisely what that word means: literally, what is beyond measure. All created things, even this universe without a physical boundary, are circumscribed in being: they have their measure; they are finite. They obey the command God gave to the sea, “Thus far and no farther.” But the all-creating God has made himself present in a new paradise, the pure and fruitful womb of Mary.

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God knew, from before the foundations of the world, before even time itself came to be — for time, as Saint Augustine says, is itself a created thing, and came into existence with the union of matter and form, when in the beginning God made heaven and earth — God knew that there would be Mary, and that the Son of God would come to dwell with us. Donne plays on this paradox, that Mary in a sense would be the maker of her Maker, the mother of her Begetter, God, and he does so with wonder and joy. I’ll now let the poem speak for itself.

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Salvation to all that will is nigh;
That All, which always is all everywhere,
Which cannot sin and yet all sins must bear,
Which cannot die, yet cannot choose but die,
Lo, faithful Virgin, yields Himself to lie
In prison in thy womb; and though He there
Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet He'll wear,
Taken from thence, flesh, which death's force may try.
Ere by the spheres time was created, thou
Wast in His mind, who is thy son and brother,
Whom thou conceiv'st, conceived; yea, thou art now
Thy Maker's maker and thy Father's mother,
Thou hast light in dark, and shut'st in little room
Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.

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Our Poem of the Week comes from the Chorus’s lines at the beginning of Act IV of Shakespeare’s play, Henry V. The scene is Agincourt, on the eve of the great battle. The English are greatly outnumbered; they are battle-weary to the marrow of their bones; the French are confident, indeed too confident. It is night. And Henry goes forth, first in his own person, and then in disguise, to cheer his officers, and to bring comfort to the common men, while hearing and judging what they say when they do not know that it’s the King they are talking to. I won’t say that the historical Henry V was a saint. In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis names him alongside Napoleon as ambitious devotees of war that spreads misery over the earth. That’s a surprise, isn’t it, from Lewis, a stout English patriot if ever there was one — but Lewis had his own fill of warfare in World War I, and that, if anything, would temper your enthusiasm for people like Alexander and Caesar and their like.

But I’m not passing judgment here on Henry; that would require a lot of historical balancing and weighing and comparing and supposing, which isn’t to my point. It’s what Shakespeare gives us in his portrayal of the King that I wish to show. This is what Shakespeare, in part, believed Henry V to be, or perhaps what he holds up as an example of what kingliness really is. The king is brave and stalwart, but not in a futile or grandiose cause. He cares for his men, but as men, and not as a sentimentalist who pretends to care. He steps down from his pedestal, not to curry favor by flattering the crowds, but to set aside the ceremony and the trappings that separate him from them, the better to feel what they feel, and to lead them as their clear and intelligent leader in battle. It isn’t a false democracy. It goes beyond equality. It is royal not in arrogance but in devotion to England and her people and what is right — at least, what Shakespeare presents the king as believing to be right. It is royal in the soul.

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It is interesting to consider, I think, that of all the presidents we have had in America, the most kingly of them all was the first, Washington, the father of our country. I don’t mean that he put on airs. I mean that he was most like the ideal of a Christian king, such that his probity, his power of command, his self-sacrifice, and his strain of quiet meekness could overawe even somebody as proud and vain as Jefferson. Had there been no Washington, I don’t think the nation would have survived even twenty years. He who fought against the rule of a king would have made — and in a way did make — a better king himself. So imagine Washington at Valley Forge, when we hear these lines from the Chorus, at Agincourt.

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Now entertain conjecture of a time
When creeping murmur and the poring dark
Fills the wide vessel of the universe.
From camp to camp through the foul womb of night
The hum of either army stilly sounds,
That the fixed sentinels almost receive
The secret whispers of each other’s watch:
Fire answers fire, and through their paly flames
Each battle sees the other’s umbered face.
Steed threatens steed, in high and boastful neighs
Piercing the night’s dull ear; and from the tents 
The armorers, accomplishing the knights,
With busy hammers closing rivets up,
Give dreadful note of preparation.
The country cocks do crow, the clocks do toll, 
And the third hour of drowsy morning name. 
Proud of their numbers and secure in soul,
The confident and over-lusty French
Do the low-rated English play at dice;
And chide the cripple tardy-gaited night
Who, like a foul and ugly witch, doth limp
So tediously away. The poor condemned English,
Like sacrifices, by their watchful fires 
Sit patiently, and inly ruminate
The morning’s danger; and their gesture sad
Investing lank-lean cheeks and war-worn coats 
Presenteth them unto the gazing moon
So many horrid ghosts. O now, who will behold
The royal captain of this ruined band
Walking from watch to watch, from tent to tent, 
Let him cry "Praise and glory on his head !" 
For forth he goes and visits all his host,
Bids them good morrow with a modest smile,
And calls them brothers, friends and countrymen.
Upon his royal face there is no note 
How dread an army hath enrounded him;
Nor doth he dedicate one jot of color
Unto the weary and all-watched night;
But freshly looks and overbears attaint 
With cheerful semblance and sweet majesty; 
That every wretch, pining and pale before,
Beholding him, plucks comfort from his looks.
A largess universal like the sun,
His liberal eye doth give to every one,
Thawing cold fear, that mean and gentle all 
Behold, as may unworthiness define,
A little touch of Harry in the night.

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Our Poem of the Week is silly, for sure, but where the heck has all the silliness gone? Yesterday I slipped in, for Thanksgiving, the lyrics of a silly song about eating too much — which I found in the same community songbook where I found the Hymn of the Week, Deep River. Who writes silly songs, in our time? Where’s that beloved Scarecrow of happy memory, who sings,

I’d not be just a nuffin’,
My head all full of stuffin’,
My heart all full of pain —
And perhaps I’d deserve you
And be even worthy erv you,
If I only had a brain!

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Or there’s that wonderful song about the Hole in the Bottom of the Sea, or my favorite limerick of all, which does what Edward Lear does in most of his limericks, that is, it repeats one of the rhyming words, but it does it in the cleverest way (I’ll set it down here a couple of lines below). The great John Ruskin said, “I really don’t know any author to whom I am half so grateful for my idle self as Edward Lear. I shall put him first of my hundred authors.” So — let’s be merry today — and merriment is joy’s country cousin!

The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher
Called a hen “a most elegant creature.”
The hen, pleased at that,
Laid an egg in his hat,
And thus did the hen reward Beecher.

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Two old Bachelors were living in one house;
One caught a Muffin, the other caught a Mouse.
Said he who caught the Muffin to him who caught the Mouse,—
“This happens just in time! For we’ve nothing in the house,
Save a tiny slice of lemon and a teaspoonful of honey,
And what to do for dinner—since we haven’t any money?
And what can we expect if we haven’t any dinner,
But to lose our teeth and eyelashes and keep on growing thinner?”

Said he who caught the Mouse to him who caught the Muffin,—
“We might cook this little Mouse, if we only had some Stuffin’!
If we had but Sage and Onion we could do extremely well;
But how to get that Stuffin’ it is difficult to tell!”

Those two old Bachelors ran quickly to the town
And asked for Sage and Onion as they wandered up and down;
They borrowed two large Onions, but no Sage was to be found
In the Shops, or in the Market, or in all the Gardens round.

But some one said, “A hill there is, a little to the north,
And to its purpledicular top a narrow way leads forth;
And there among the rugged rocks abides an ancient Sage,—
An earnest Man, who reads all day a most perplexing page.
Climb up, and seize him by the toes,—all studious as he sits,—
And pull him down, and chop him into endless little bits!
Then mix him with your Onion (cut up likewise into Scraps),—
When your Stuffin’ will be ready, and very good—perhaps.”

Those two old Bachelors without loss of time
The nearly purpledicular crags at once began to climb;
And at the top, among the rocks, all seated in a nook,
They saw that Sage a-reading of a most enormous book.

“You earnest Sage!” aloud they cried, “your book you’ve read enough in!
We wish to chop you into bits to mix you into Stuffin’!”

But that old Sage looked calmly up, and with his awful book,
At those two Bachelors’ bald heads a certain aim he took;
And over Crag and precipice they rolled promiscuous down,—
At once they rolled, and never stopped in lane or field or town;
And when they reached their house, they found (besides their want of Stuffin’),
The Mouse had fled—and, previously, had eaten up the Muffin.

They left their home in silence by the once convivial door;
And from that hour those Bachelors were never heard of more.

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And then there is the human darkness, the subject of our Poem of the Week. A second or third-rate poet might give us blank ignorance, or the foulest evil, but how easy then it would be for us to pat our own heads and say, “We’re not that way, we’re enlightened, we’re good, we bring daylight wherever we go!” But Frost instead gives us a series of suggestions, all the more powerful in that they are understated. Vagueness is usually a fault, but by no means always, and Frost was one of our greatest poets when it came to not saying things. “I have promises to keep,” says his man beside the woods on the snowy evening, and he does not say what they are. His Oven-Bird asks the question, “what to make of a diminished thing,” but that is the last line of the poem, and there is no answer.

So it seems to be here. Man carries his darkness about with him. The speaker walks out in the rain at night, when I suppose nobody with a happy motive would do so, and comes back when it is still raining. He passes by the watchman on his beat, and drops his eyes, as if he were guilty — of what? We don’t know. Mostly we keep our darkness hidden from ourselves, but there are times when it seems that guilt, not for any certain crime, but just for being as we are, betrays us into a moment of honesty, which passes as quickly as does the image of the watchman. He has walked down “the saddest city lane.” A lane cannot be sad, can it? But the shards of human life can be — a broken bottle, the scrap of a newspaper, weeds slowly crumbling the brick base of an apartment building nobody keeps trim anymore, a baseball with its stitches undone, garbage left carelessly to small creatures of crevices and shadows — evidence of futility, or resignation, or some unspecifiable human trouble.

The night he describes is one for the ears as well as the eyes. He has stopped his own footsteps when “an interrupted cry / Came over houses from another street.” A cry of what? Physical pain? Sorrow? Fear? But it is far away, not even in the same street, and it is interrupted, as if some dreaded hand had stifled the cry in someone else’s mouth. What can be done about it? And he lifts his eyes above, where there is no sky, there are no stars, but the luminous face of a clock with the time on it, a time that is neither wrong nor right. It is as if the speaker himself were a clock out of time with the universe, if the universe has a time to be in or out of. And then he repeats the first line, “I have been one acquainted with the night.” When he said it at first, we think that he is going to describe what he has experienced, outside of himself. When he says it at the end, we know also that he means something within himself. And “acquainted”? It’s an understated word, and one that we use lightly, not to describe any profound relation. Here the understatement appears deliberate and ironic. It is more than an acquaintance.

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A note about the form of the poem. It has 14 lines, so you might be justified in supposing that it’s going to be a sonnet. It is not. It is divided into tercets, rhyming with the terza rima pattern that Dante invented for his Trinitarian poem, the Divine Comedy. I don’t think that Frost had Purgatory or Paradise in mind here, though. It’s Inferno, rather, or a suggestion of it. The tercets interlock, as in Dante, rhyming ABA BCB CDC DED, and then, if we were following Dante precisely, we would round off the end of the poem as he rounds off his cantos, with a single rhyming line at the end, thus: ABA BCB CDC DEDE. That would give us 13 lines. But Frost didn’t want that. He wanted, if I may venture a guess, to weld together Dante’s meter with the sonnet, and he rounds off the poem by repeating the first line, as an “extra” line, powerful in its plain and self-contained statement. Was the old Florentine poet acquainted with the night? “So am I,” says Frost.

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I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. 
I have been one acquainted with the night.

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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 hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber. Learn more about our subscription tiers by clicking the button below.

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The boy in question, the author’s son, is in his father’s study, poring over a copy of Plutarch’s Lives, comparative biographies of famous Greeks and Romans: for instance, the life of the great Athenian statesman, Pericles, paired for comparison with the life of Quintus Fabius Maximus “the Delayer,” that shrewd, conservative, and envious opponent of Hannibal, who wore him out so long by attrition on the Italian peninsula. Hutson sees that these biographies are perennially interesting — they inspired Shakespeare’s Greek and Roman plays, and they instilled a hunger into that Corsican adventurer, the energetic, restless, and all-ambitious Napoleon. Plutarch is gold.

A few words about the poem. It’s a sonnet, with the difficult rhyme scheme ABBA ABBA CDCDCD. It divides quite nicely into the octave and the sestet. The first eight lines describe what the author imagines his son’s feelings to be as he reads, transporting us to the Aegean and to Italy. Then in the last six lines he turns to the book as an instructor, first of three great men, Shakespeare, Montaigne, and Napoleon, Shakespeare the artist, Montaigne the essayist, and Napoleon the man of war. After those three comes “my boy,” and the deliberately and intriguingly vague “something” that the author says he will no doubt get from Plutarch. That’s in the last line, nicely set apart, and perfectly understated, with a touch of colloquialism after the high language preceding it. Only someone brought up on the classics would have written that last line in that context. Well done, Professor Hutson!

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Is it my Plutarch that the boy holds there
     Upon his knee, his soul absorbed in deeds
     Of other races, lands, and times, and creeds,
The soft Aegean breeze within his hair,
     And tales of heroes for his daily fare?
     Ah! let him burn to face the haughty Medes,
And glory in the men that Athens breeds,
Or thrill at all the odds that Romans dare!
E'en thus it was that Shakespeare learned to know
     His Timon and his Serpent of old Nile,
     And thus Montaigne in wisdom learned to grow,
And thus the Corsican who left his isle
     To rule a world got thews that world to throw;
     My boy may get him something worth his while.

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The poem is a tissue of alternating long and short lines, with alternating rhymes, like the strong and soft beat of the heart, or the flow and ebb of the tide, or the surge of youth and the slow retreat of old age. We have four stanzas, the first and third with one metrical pattern, the second and fourth with another pattern, similar but fuller, suggesting both ease and final strength. The idea behind the poem is simple. When you cross the “bar,” that is, the sandbar that shields the bay from the mighty waves of the open ocean, you may hear the “moaning” of the waters as they wash over it, if the tide is at a low level. But if the tide is high, and the weather is good, then the waters will be full and calm, and you will not notice the sandbar beneath. Let my farewell be like that, says Tennyson. And let it be so, not because he believes he is being resolved into lifeless matter, but because — and here the man of faith gets up from that bed and stands tall — he hopes to meet his Pilot, as he recalls the words of Saint Paul: “For now we see as in a glass, darkly; but then, face to face.”

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Sunset and evening star,
      And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
      When I put out to sea,

   But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
      Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
      Turns again home.

   Twilight and evening bell,
      And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
      When I embark;

   For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
      The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
      When I have crost the bar.

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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 hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber. Learn more about our subscription tiers by clicking the button below.

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“People have to move on,” you’ll say, and that’s true, but sometimes I imagine time and change as a policeman, coming up to someone lingering in the vicinity of a house where nobody lives anymore, and saying, “That’s enough. Move on, fellow,” laying a firm hand on his shoulder. That’s as much as to say, “You have nothing here. Keep going.” Back in 2011, Debra and I went back to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where we had met each other and fallen in love and gotten married, 25 years before. We wanted to visit the church, a beautiful stone building, but when we got there, all we saw was the broad front yard of a house far off the road. Somebody came out of the house to ask what we were looking for. “Saint Thomas More Church,” we said, and that’s when we found out that they had taken the church apart because the congregation got too big. They built another one a mile away, preserving some of the stone and a couple of the stained glass windows. But of course it was a big sprawling modern thing — not the same. I guess every American has had experiences like that.

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But in our Poem of the Week, Robert Frost takes an uncharacteristically sunny view of such a change. The speaker’s father built a home far up a mountainside; too far, actually. But through hard work and stubbornness, we suppose, he managed to scrape by, and the mountain “seemed to like the stir.” And a stir it must have been, because he and his wife managed to have a dozen girls and boys. What a mountain could give to those children, the speaker doesn’t say. He leaves it to us to guess at. Imagine a mountain, children, a farm too high uphill, no doubt on the sunny side if they were going to get anything to grow at all, and the years it would take to get them all out of childhood — twenty or thirty years at least. And what’s left?

The speaker doesn’t say that, either. He doesn’t mull over a stone wall that doesn’t any longer keep anything in or out. He doesn’t point out to us any hitching post with an iron loop turned to rust. All he does is to express, without actually putting it in words, his gratitude for the mountain. For the mountain didn’t just nurture them. She — the mountain is like a mother — pushed them off her knees. That is, she gave birth to them, and then said, “Now you must go and live your lives.” And the last line is simple and brilliant: “And now her lap is full of trees.”

Here further up the mountain slope
Than there was ever any hope,
My father built, enclosed a spring,
Strung chains of wall round everything,
Subdued the growth of earth to grass,
And brought our various lives to pass.
A dozen girls and boys we were.
The mountain seemed to like the stir.
And made of us a little while —
With always something in her smile.
Today she wouldn’t know our name.
(No girl’s, of course, has stayed the same.)
The mountain pushed us off her knees.
And now her lap is full of trees.

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Our author today, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, gives the lie to the canard that to be a great artist you have to lead a miserable life — she and her husband Robert loved each other as warmly and closely and fully as any man and woman ever have. After all, he had whisked her out of her unhappy life in London, kept in a sort of straitjacket, she and her siblings, by their pathologically controlling father. She was never in very good health, but that didn’t make Robert impatient; he loved her all the more, the more he had to care for her. How much might we give to have been with the Brownings when they lived in Italy, in that dry climate, for the sake of Elizabeth’s health, and there they met and befriended the Hawthornes from America, Nathanael and Sophia — another couple deeply in love, and that certainly didn’t hurt Nathanael’s genius one bit.

Now then, in our sonnet today, Elizabeth begs Robert not to love her for anything she possesses, or for anything that is at all subject to time. That includes even his own loving care for her, and his pity when he wiped the tears from her eyes, because that pity too is ironically subject to change, because she grows joyful under his care — and then what’s left to pity? We may well like such things. If I think of the small town where I grew up, when it endures changes that wear away what I used to know, and essentially becomes a completely different place, it doesn’t move me in the same way, if it moves me at all. But persons aren’t like that. Each person is a world of meaning, an abyss of mystery. To love a person is to rise above the river of change. Isn’t it why we enjoy looking at pictures of the person we love when they were little children, long before we met? I have more pictures of the little Debra than she has of the little me, but any such picture is something to cherish, because when you love, you love the whole person, all of his or her life, and beyond life, too.

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So in our Poem of the Week, Elizabeth asks Robert to do what in fact he did: to love her for the sake of love. She doesn’t mean that as a tautology. We are in the precincts of the divine. We take our toddling steps, led by love, from time and change, toward eternity.

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If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love’s sake only. Do not say
I love her for her smile ... her look ... her way
Of speaking gently, ... for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day’—
For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may
Be changed, or change for thee,—and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry,—
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love’s sake, that evermore
Thou may’st love on, through love’s eternity.

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