Rambling On with History Explored: When poets turn to history for inspiration
By DAVID MYTON
Dear Subscribers - This is my regular Rambling On history post - not the usual referenced, research-essay style. Please feel free to chip in with (preferably polite, informative) comments and/or examples.
These days there are many ways of recording and explaining history, ranging from good old books to podcasts and videos on platforms such as YouTube. Not so common now is employing poetry to mark some historical event - or at least a subjective version of that event.
I thought I’d share a few poems from ye olde days when it was more common to refer (often very tangentially) to a reality which the poets thought warranted some kind of lyric memorial.
So I will begin with Percy Shelley’s great poem Ozymandias, the fate awaiting tyrants in the distances of time. It tells the real story of a ruined statue of Ozymandias (the Greek name for Ramses II of Egypt, who reigned in the 13th century bce), on which is inscribed, “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Around the statue, “The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias
The God Abandons Antony
Constantine P. Cavafy is one of my favourite poets and his works frequently delve into the past, especially ancient history. The God Abandons Antony refers to Plutarch's story of how Antony was besieged in Alexandria by Octavian and he is staring defeat in the face. At midnight he hears music and voices - Antony’s household god Dionysus (Bacchus), is deserting him. And it all goes downhill from there … Alert readers will recognise this as the basis for Leonard Cohen’s great song of lost love, Alexandra Leaving.
The God Abandons Antony
At midnight, when suddenly you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn you luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive - don’t mourn them uselessly:
as one long prepared and full of courage,
say goodbye to her, to Alexandria who is leaving …
(excerpt from C.P. Cavafy - Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard, Chatto & Windus, London, 1998)
Anna Akhmatova wrote the poem Courage in 1942 not long after being evacuated from Leningrad, which at the time was under siege by the German Wehrmacht. Akhmatova’s patriotism was “synonymous with her efforts to serve as the guardian of an endangered culture”, according to the Poetry Foundation..
Courage
We know what trembles in the scales,
What has to be accomplished.
The hour for courage. If all else fails,
With courage we are not unfurnished.
What though the dead be crowded, each to each,
What though our houses be destroyed? —
We will preserve you, Russian speech,
Keep you alive, great Russian word.
We will pass you to our sons and heirs
Free and clean, and they in turn to theirs,
And so forever.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
The Charge of the Light Brigade
When I was at school back in the darkest 1960s contemporary pedagogy insisted that it was good for kids to memorise poetry - and top of the list was Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade. With its dactylic dimeter or falling rhythm mimicking galloping horses, it was reasonably easy for us latter-day junior Imperialists to commit to memory. Tennyson’s genius was that he could take a humiliating military defeat and turn it into some kind of moral victory (much like Dunkirk in a later war).
The Charge of the Light Brigade
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
‘Forward the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismayed?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Someone had blundered:
Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them
Cannon to left of them …
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell …
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807-1882
Paul Revere’s Ride
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the most widely known and best-loved American poets of the 19th century, according to the Poetry Foundation. “He achieved a level of national and international prominence previously unequaled in the literary history of the United States and is one of the few American writers honored in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey...”
Paul Revere’s Ride, spoken by the landlord of the Wayside Inn, tells the heroic story of how Revere rides through the night alerting patriots in Medford, Lexington, and Concord that the bad British are landing from the sea to oppress local Yankee folks.
Paul Revere’s Ride
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April in Seventy-Five
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year
He said to his friend, - if the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch
Of the North-Church-tower, as a signal light, -
One if by land, and two by the sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm.
Then he said good-night and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, a British man-of-war …
- https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Paul_Revere%27s_Ride.jpg
Newdigate Poem - ‘The Benefits of the Electric Light’
This is an hilarious poem - composed for a poetry competition - by the (sometimes controversial and often ornery) Belloc. It’s a panegyric, written in 1892, to Oxford’s first electricity lighting station. I love it …
Hail, Happy Muse, and touch the tuneful string!
The benefits conferred by Science, I sing
I only write about them in connection
With benefits which the Electric Light
Confers on us; especially at night.
These are my theme, of these my song shall rise.
My lofty head shall swell to strike the skies.
And tears of hopeless love bedew the maiden’s eyes.
Descend, Oh Muse, from thy divine abode,
To Osney, on the Seven Bridges Road;
For under Osney’s solitary shade
The bulk of the Electric Light is made …
(From Sonnets and Verse by H. Belloc, Duckworth, London, 1923)
Randall Jarrell (1914-65)
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
(From The Penguin Book of American Verse, ed Geoffrey Moore, Penguin, 1977)
Jarrell, who served in the Army Air Forces, provided the following explanatory note: “A ball turret was a Plexiglas sphere set into the belly of a B-17, B-24, B-25, B-32 and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine guns and one man, a short small man. When this gunner tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upside-down in his little sphere, he looked like the fetus in the womb. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose. Technical/Historical Note: Of these aircraft, only the B-17 and B-24 had ball turrets.”
Byron’s poem The Destruction of Sennacherib is based on the biblical account of the historical Assyrian siege of Jerusalem in 701 BC by Assyrian king Sennacherib, as described in 2 Kings 18–19, Isaiah 36–37. “The rhythm of the poem has a feel of the beat of a galloping horse's hooves (an anapestic tetrameter) as the Assyrian rides into battle”.
The Destruction of Sennacherib
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.
For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!
And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.
And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.
And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43827/the-destruction-of-sennacherib
See also Ogden Nash’s brilliant response to Byron:
One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by the authors of simile and
metaphor.
Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,
Can't seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have to
go out of their way to say that it is like something else.
What does it mean when we are told
That that Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold?
In the first place, George Gordon Byron had enough experience
To know that it probably wasn't just one Assyrian, it was a lot of Assyrians …
And there we have it. Have you got any favourite “history” poems you’d like to share?
best regards
David M
What a great way to start my morning—revisiting poems of my youth and meeting some new ones—all with historical reference. Thank you.
Thank you for this varied and informative ramble. The contrasting styles and subject matter make for interesting reading. I do take issue with your praise of Ogden Nash’s comments as “brilliant”, since much of the most enjoyable and creative literature is enriched by the use of smilies and metaphors. In particular I think that Nash’s criticism of the use of “the Assyrian” where it is clear enough that the poet refers to an army, is quite simplistic. Overall, your rambles provide much to think about and enjoy.