What is it like to be a boy stirred with stories of martial courage and the desire to accomplish great works? The author of our Poem of the Week, Charles Woodward Hutson, could tell us. He lived to be 95 years old, dying in 1936, no doubt one of the last survivors of the Civil War. After the war, and after a period in which he studied law and worked as an attorney, he turned to literature, which he had loved since he was a child — when his companions were Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, and the epics of Homer and Virgil. We can suppose that by the time he was a man, he was reading them in Greek and Latin. So he embarked on a career as a professor of language and literature, learning, besides those ancient languages, French, Spanish, Italian, and German. He was a prodigious scholar. You would have to be, to write books with titles like A History of French Literature, or The Story of Language, or The Beginnings of Civilization. He also wrote novels and poetry, and, in his old age, after he had been a professor at various colleges in the south (Louisiana State, Mississippi, Texas A & M, and South Georgia, where he served as president too), he took up oil painting, though he’d never had a single lesson in it. His works in that field too won considerable respect.
I first found today’s poem in just the place where it was published, and in the same way anybody at the time might have found it. It’s in my bound volume of The Century Magazine, November 1899 to April 1900. Right after it is a long article, the third in a series, called “Sailing Alone Around the World,” a first-person account by Capt. Joshua Slocum of the 46,000-mile sailing trip he took on his sloop; in this part of his narrative, he sails through the Straits of Magellan and on northwest to Samoa. It’s really a happy coincidence that the poem and the article are so near. We may now wonder why so many boys lied about their age to join the Army in the second World War. They wanted to fight in what everyone in America believed was a war for liberty and justice, against the imperial ambitions of Japan, the fascist ambitions of Italy, and the thorough madness and wickedness of the Nazis in Germany. But I think we’d go wrong to suppose that an idea in the mind alone motivated them, or even the passion of patriotism. It seems obvious when you think about it, that the sex that must fight should in some ways find it adventurous and exciting to do so; otherwise it would not get done at all. Besides, when Hutson was writing the poem, trench warfare and its miseries, not to mention mustard gas, hadn’t yet been visited upon the world. In any case, Hutson’s poem isn’t so much about fighting, which he himself had seen plenty of in that terrible blood-letting that cost almost as many American soldiers’ lives as have all her other wars combined. It is about that aspiration toward high and noble action.
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!
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.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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