President’s Day poetry
[NOTE: Today is Presidents’ Day or Washington’s Birthday – or both – and this is a repeat of a previous post.]
I’m not that old, but pedagogical practices in my youth seem absolutely archaic compared to whatever passes for education these days. For starters, we had Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday, and they were on their actual real birthdays: Lincoln on February 12, and Washington on February 22.
Two days off! But they didn’t necessarily fall on Mondays; they fell whenever they fell, and sometimes – alas – they fell on a Saturday or a Sunday.
We also had to memorize terrible patriotic poetry back then, and lots of it. When I say “terrible” I’m not referring to its patriotism, I mean that it just wasn’t very good poetry. I suppose kids weren’t supposed to care about that aspect of it. Also, in those days I was very quick at memorizing poetry and so those early poems have tended to stick. Therefore I have a relatively large bank of memorized doggerel to draw on.
One of those poems was about George Washington. To give you an idea of the flavor of what I’m talking about, it started this way: “Only a baby, fair and small…” and then filled the reader in on all the stages of Washington’s life, verse by verse. I had never looked it up online and was skeptical that it could be found, but voila! Here it is; isn’t the internet great?
And I now present it to you as an example of what the New York City schoolchild used to have to memorize and recite. I seem to recall this was in fifth grade:
Only a baby, fair and small,
Like many another baby son,
Whose smiles and tears came swift at call,
Who ate and slept and grew – that’s all,
The infant Washington.
I’ll let you go to the site and see it for yourself. The next verse is for the schoolboy Washington, then we have the lad Washington, then finally man/patriot and a lot of generalities with the only specifics being “surveyor, general, president.” Why so much emphasis on Washington’s boyhood I don’t know; maybe to go with the cherry tree story. But still, at least we were taught to think highly of Washington.
And Lincoln had a poem for memorization, too. It was a better effort than the Washington one, I think, although still not very good and rather creepy at that. I see now that the poem was by Rosemary Benet, apparently the wife of Stephen Vincent Benet.
I have no idea why the poem they had us memorize about Lincoln was not about his accomplishments at all, but rather about the mother who died when he was nine years old. In the poem, she comes back as a ghost and inquires about him. But here it is:
If Nancy Hanks
Came back as a ghost,
Seeking news
Of what she loved most,
She’d ask first
“Where’s my son?
What’s happened to Abe?
What’s he done?”“Poor little Abe,
Left all alone.
Except for Tom,
Who’s a rolling stone;
He was only nine,
The year I died.
I remember still
How hard he cried.”“Scraping along
In a little shack,
With hardly a shirt
To cover his back,
And a prairie wind
To blow him down,
Or pinching times
If he went to town.”“You wouldn’t know
About my son?
Did he grow tall?
Did he have fun?
Did he learn to read?
Did he get to town?
Do you know his name?
Did he get on?”
The urge that rose in me was to shout, “Yes, YES, don’t you know?” into the void.
Instead of that one, we might have been asked to memorize this poem – or at least the very last part of it, which I’ve always liked:
And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down
As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs,
Goes down with a great shout upon the hills,
And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.
Or what about this old chestnut by Walt Whitman? Schmaltzy, but it still gives me a little shiver when I read it:
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
I saw a video recently claiming that the Lincoln assassination was part of a much larger scheme to take out the Union leadership.
Seward was attacked the same night and was injured and survived, Grant was expected to be in the box with Lincoln but a change of plans kept him elsewhere.
I have no idea of the accuracy of the video claims.
I was once in a ferocious online debate about the nature of poetry and why it doesn’t now have much of an audience. Most arguments boiled down to the inability of Americans to appreciate the depths of modern poetry.
A major American poet insisted that true poetry evoked “the magnification and clarification of being.” Whatever that might be. Clearly far beyond most Americans.
Some poetry may do that, I replied, but not all. I cited “Casey at the Bat” and “O Captain! My Captain!” Poems I have loved and still do and feel no shame in doing so.
More Americans would read poetry today if there were more poems like those.
“For starters, we had Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday, . . . .”
“We” did, too. As a sheltered youth, it never ever occurred to me that there were people and, in fact, entire states, that did not celebrate Lincoln’s Birthday. But there were.
I learned, maybe some fifty years ago, that they were still fighting, or at least smarting from, the Civil War in large parts of the USA south. ** Is that still the case? **
[We’re undergoing our own Civil War II right now as we speak/type, replete with open defiance of the central government, occasionally violently, but . . . never mind.]
Richard Ilyes:
The plan was to kill Lincoln, Seward, and VP Johnson, and it was a conspiracy. This is known, and not speculation. Seward was wounded, but Johnson wasn’t. Booth had heard Grant was going to be at the theater with the Lincolns, but the Grants didn’t go. As far as I know, there’s no dispute about these things.
huxley:
Agreed.
I wrote two posts on the subject. They’re from the early days of the blog, so I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen them: this and this.
The Captain didn’t have a particularly good XO, though.
Thanks Neo.
Recent events have led me to study the US Civil War. i ran across “Madness Rules the Hour: Charleston, 1860 and the Mania for War” which seems to describe the same sort of hysteria that has become common among the TDS afflicted.
I just started reading “Abundance or Collapse: The Fork in the Road for AI, Robotics, and Civilization” which describes the upeaval soon to occur as AI and robotics bring about rapid change. The author is a former Musk engineer. It is an excellent read so far.
Is the Whitman poem schmaltzy because of the wording and event it is describing so indirectly, or due to the repeated exposures to its reading or publication? Some may be affected no matter how often they read it, but for others it would lose its impact after 5 or 10 viewings.
During this 250th year’s celebrations I expect we will see many discussions of the DOI and the Gettysburg Address, which have and can probably justify and successfully withstand many different analyses. Other patriotic or historical documents may also be given useful attention, but probably would not bear too many analysts before boredom set in.
I am not a great fan of Whitman – but let’s remind ourselves that he was a breath of vibrant, spontaneous, American fresh air in his time, and still less stilted, and more modern and readable, than most of his contemporaries.
Even with this poem – the ultimate, lugubrious “official poet laureate” task – he manages to remain vigorous and break/bend the meter for dramatic effect.
— R2L
I don’t find it ‘schmaltzy’ at all. For one thing, even though it is in one sense about Lincoln, in another sense, like most great poetry, it has general applicability. We all know that life is like that sometimes, the person who makes a good thing possible doesn’t live to see it, for whatever reason. From Moses to Lincoln to whoever you choose, it happens that way sometimes.
On another level, by the time I was in school poetry was not much in evidence in our elementary or high school studies. I got a little exposure to it. I discovered that I like Frost in high school because of assigned readings, for ex. But not very much.
Which might be why I encounter the old poems now with pleasure, precisely because they are relatively fresh and new to me.
I love Emily Dickenson’s The Name of it is Autumn:
— Emily Dickenson
I never even knew that poem existed until well into adulthood.
Sometimes, something that is very good is so endlessly quoted, referenced, or parodied that you lose the sense of how it good it really was. Also known as Seinfeld Is Unfunny.
“Citizen Kane” is an outstanding example. What made it stand out rapidly became industry standard, so someone growing up seeing movies since “Citizen Kane” doesn’t see why it’s so special.
It’s hard to read old classics, whether poetry or prose, without running into the same thing.
Re: Walt Whitman
Lugubrious? I’d say electrifying.
I remember a hot summer night in my cheap New Orleans studio, listening in the dark to Orson Welles intone “Song of Myself” in his magnificent rolling voice. It was a transformative experience. It was like God speaking to me.
I didn’t know poetry could do that. I didn’t know an American could do that. Like it or not, and most academics don’t, Whitman became our first world poet and I would say he remains so. His influence was global. For instance, without Whitman we would have no Neruda as we know him.
Whitman is called the father of free verse and he broke American poetry open in a way that succeeding poets built upon. He is indispensable.
Re: Whitman 2
“O Captain! My Captain” as a poet laureate task?
Hardly.
Whitman wrote poems based on Lincoln’s assassination, the first immediately afterward. He was passionate about abolition, he served in the Civil War as a volunteer nurse, he was devastated by Lincoln’s death and those experiences helped shape his poetry.
This and another major Whitman poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”, expressed the national grief and his personal loss of Lincoln.
“O Captain!” was not at all a poetic exercise to mark an occasion. It was real stuff and we can hear the echoes still.