W.H. Auden said ”poetry makes nothing happen,” and one might equally argue that history doesn’t cure the present or stop the change in changing times, but knowing both may provide perspective, consolation or fair warning. Especially in times like ours, whose import we struggle to grasp.
Recently our daily strife called up an echo in my memory of “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” by W.B.Yeats. It addresses the final anarchic period of Irish unrest (1919-1921) with the Irish seeking full independence and the British refusing, both sides employing brutal tit for tat violence — the IRA versus the Black and Tans.
At the time Yeats told a correspondent that he was writing “a lamentation over lost peace and lost hope.” To him, this catastrophe echoed others in history, and he began his poem by saying that “Many ingenious lovely things are gone” from the time of Athens on, gone
“An ancient image made of olive wood —
And gone are Phidias’ famous ivories
And all the golden grasshoppers and bees.”
He sees the destruction of civilizations, that constantly recurs, happening again in his time. “We too had pretty toys when young,” Yeats says. They thought the rule of law offered security, that habits of tolerance “made old wrong melt down,” that peace and prosperity would last because “the worst rogues and rascals had died out.” Not so.
“Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare rides upon sleep.” Instead of a world brought “under rule” comes one of “weasels fighting in a hole.” Now there is no comfort to be found. “Man is in love and loves what vanishes,” because all around the country can easily be found “incendiary or bigot”
“To burn that stump on the Acropolis
Or break in bits the famous ivories
Or traffic in the grasshoppers or bees”.
Yeats had meditated for many years on such mutability, and during this period concluded that “violence demonstrates the fragility of social rules,” a lesson the last three years have surely taught America. By 1933, Yeats was expressing a view similar to one that recently came out of the mouth of a person close to me “wrought to the extreme” by our degenerating politics. “I find myself constantly urging the despotic rule of the educated classes,” in preference to “mere anarchy.”
This from a man who a few years before had argued against “rigid minds” who refused to acknowledge the fluid nature of a “flowing and living world” and who believed that “all achievements are won by compromise.” By the time of “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” he had seemed to have concluded all such thoughts had been naive.
“We had fed our hearts on fantasies,
The heart grows brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love…”
It’s but a short step from there to his famous vision of apocalypse, “The Second Coming,” written in 1919. It imagines a polity in which “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.”
In our time the Rough Beasts have slouched toward the board rooms, the state house, the court house, the Capitol and the Oval Office. The ingenious lovely things that are going, if not yet altogether gone, are a belief in equal justice under law, democracy, civic order, progress, humanism, international order, learning, science, morality, and truth.
The temperatures increase, the waters rise, the coral reefs and a million species die, barbarians destroy the work of centuries, melt down the golden grasshoppers and bees for a fast buck. We worry about the daily tweet and which minority to hate, while our birthright is pilfered by totalitarian hackers and domestic collaborators seeking another term in office.
“How deserted lies the city,
once so full of people!
How like a widow is she,
who once was great among the nations!
She who was queen among the provinces
has now become a slave.”