There are times when it really helps to take a few steps back and view the modern world through the lens of the classic poets. It is the role of a poet to use our language, in its highest form, to attempt expression of the often inexpressible. A great poem will reveal a fleeting yet fixed glimpse into Truth and our own souls. And when one comprehends its meaning, the cathartic effect can be healing and enlightening.
Lucky us, today's Daily Kibitz features three short but fantastic poems that are as pertinent to our current condition as they were when composed at various times over the last 200 years. What we'll try to do is to provide our own nugget analysis of what the poem means in general terms. Then we'll tie it in with how it relates to what's happening today.
Let's start with a poem from 1867. "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold, is perhaps the first poem about Existentialism - before Existentialism was even imagined! Written from his honeymoon cottage above the beach below, Arnold moves beyond his own sense of sound and vision to figure why his soul feels empty. And why the world seems meaningless. And what he and his bride can do about it.
Boom Boom, out go the lights! Faith as a centerpiece of life recedes like the tide. The Industrial Revolution, the fading Enlightenment, the overextension of the British Empire and the publication of Darwin's "Origin of Species" all contribute here as background factors to pull the rug out from the Victorian bedrock reliance of Religion and Man's Purpose.
And like then, we live in a time of great "churn", where Faith and Purpose are questioned and Institutions are attacked. It's unprecedented, the velocity of change we experience and the quantity of information we consume. But without certainty, without an abiding sense of Truth, we too are on that darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight.
It's a dark and scary world when the light goes out. And it feels very much like we are collateral damage as today's ignorant partisan and tribal armies clash by nihilistic night. Arnold's world view may be bleak, but his solution is to love one another apart from the travails of the everyday. It may not seem like much, but it represents a Giant Step Forward.
Our next selection is from the great William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming", written in 1919. Yeats was an Irish romantic mystic who had witnessed the shattering cataclysm of World War 1, and the Easter Uprising in Dublin. Like Arnold, he saw events leading to chaos in the world and the diminution of previously long-held essential values. The Great War was over, and Ireland was still ruled by Britain, but beneath the veneer of order and stability raged a new sense of upside-down meaninglessness. And from this sense of nihilism would sprout monsters.
Here it is, with perhaps the most potent, and quoted, first stanza in all of World Literature:
What a profound and unnerving vision! The immediate power of this poem is felt directly today. Our own country has experienced an enormous and staggering shock to its system. It is now ruled by a government that promotes the apotheosis of The Strong Man. It exalts a Big Business and Autocratic agenda that knowingly desecrates the foundations of our democratic republic. It shunts aside the values of Conservation in pursuit of toxic short-term growth.
As "things fall apart" and the center's hold on stability collapses, it becomes easy to create a narrative that questions Truth in a way that makes people dependent on whoever is the loudest and most insistent. When traditional Truth-tellers have been made to look shady by The Strong Man, people will be more likely to seek "the Truth" from him and his government alone.
Interestingly, the Alt-Right/White Supremacist community early on embraced Donald Trump as one of their own. Many sites described him as their "Lion" and depicted him as something of a Manticore, much like what Yeats described.
To help us understand where our dark and turbulent world is headed, let's get some advice from Percy Bysshe Shelley. Our final poem, "Ozymandias", was written on January 11, 1818. The Napoleonic Wars were over. The Age of Kings was drawing to a close. Europe had survived a period where a megalomaniac was responsible for the deaths of millions. Shelley used the image of a waste land to capture the hubris, and the ultimate legacy, of such a leader:
It's not going to end well for Donald Trump, his family and - if we're lucky - his enablers in the Republican Party. Within a year or so, there will be damning indictments that will hobble his Administration into irrelevance and tarnish his sycophants in Congress. He may escape imprisonment - using a defense of impaired mental abilities comes to mind - but his son, his son-in-law and many powerful others will stand trial and see prison time. His cherished Trump Organization will come crashing down as breathtaking financial crimes are exposed.
The extent of these and Russian-related crimes will be seen throughout the Republican Party (and even within some of the Democratic Party). The tumult created by these criminal revelations will shake an already shaken nation, and the world. The great cloud of dust will settle to show a vast Waste Land (hello, T.S. Eliot... some other time). No one will believe it all happened!
Then, again if we're lucky, we can start over by simply loving one another and build on these small scale units of Trust. And stay on guard against the next tide that will inevitably roll in. And helping us keep guard, watching the "long, withdrawing roar" of the "blood-dimmed tide" is the Poet. The Poet is the Lighthouse Keeper, sending the beam of Truth out for all those who can see it.
