The last sentence in Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry is the only one most people remember: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” But the argument that precedes this statement is even more provocative than its conclusion. Shelley argues that poets have always had a tangible effect on the laws that govern human societies because their poems exploit our innate ability to recognize what is true and beautiful in life. “A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.” The secret to poetry’s persuasive power is the intense pleasure it provides, which inspires people to live by their ideals rather than simply according to their animal needs. “Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it falls open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with delight.”
Lately I have found myself wondering: If Shelley’s argument is valid, and poets form the conscience of the race, then what can they tell us about the hostilities that have developed between Canada and the United States? I suspect I’m not the only one who finds the situation baffling. There seems no way to explain it, other than by reference to Donald Trump’s infantile desire to humiliate and bully his neighbour into submission. This raises two questions. First, what would our “unacknowledged legislators” say about such a situation? And second, has any of them written something that could serve as advice for the best way of dealing with it?
Before beginning our brief survey of English-language poetry, I should make my own prejudices clear. I consider Mr. Trump not just a bully but a tyrant according to the dictionary definition of the term: “an absolute ruler who seizes power without legal right.” He may have been elected democratically, but once in office, he has shown such contempt for the law that his rule may properly be called tyrannical. I also believe that the only right response to his provocations is unyielding opposition. In Rudyard Kipling’s “Dane-Geld,” which I treat at the end of this essay, I think I’ve unearthed at least one poem that explains why such opposition is necessary.
We begin with Shelley himself and his poem entitled “Sonnet: England in 1819.” The first line runs so: “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king.” It’s easy enough to pin this line on Mr. Trump’s sleeve since he has proclaimed himself a king on more than one occasion, and since he corresponds in character or essence to each of the adjectives that modify that noun. In the same way, if we substitute “senators and representatives” for “princes” in the second line, then the description that follows forms a perfect mirror of the current crop of Republican legislators.
… the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn—and from a muddy spring—
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
Shelley describes a people “starved and stabbed,” an army that functions as a “two-edged sword” to quell domestic protest and foreign revolutions, and a state religion that is “Christless.” Nevertheless, he ends the poem on a note of hope by suggesting that all the negative factors that plague his country may act as graves from which a Phantom will “burst” to bring about a better day. (All of the poems cited in this essay are reproduced in full in the Appendix at the end, with the exception of Auden’s September 1, 1939, which is limited to its first two stanzas.)
Closer to home in time and place is Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s popular diatribe “Pity the Nation.” Ferlinghetti wrote this poem near the end of George Bush’s presidency. It was frequently cited by exasperated Americans during Mr. Trump’s first term. Since his re-election last year, online references to the poem have soared, to the point that it now enjoys the status of an internet meme.
In this poem, Ferlinghetti assumes the persona of a Biblical prophet. He begins by turning the New Testament metaphor of the Good Shepherd on its head:
Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
And whose shepherds mislead them.
He is suggesting that the people themselves bear as much responsibility for their unhappy situation as their unprincipled leaders. Overall, the mood of the poem is one of resigned despair. Its power comes from a certain accuracy of description, and from the way Ferlinghetti employs devices such as repetition and alliteration. He repeats the title phrase six times, each time shoving the knife a little deeper into the guts of his native land. He applies alliteration most forcefully and to best effect in the third line: “Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced.”
What the poem lacks is any hint of subtlety. Reading it is like getting smacked in the mouth repeatedly, but perhaps that is the poet’s point. Unlike in Shelley’s poem, there is no suggestion at the end that the people have any grounds for hope; instead, the very last line reads as a savagely bitter burlesque of the patriotic hymn “My country, t’is of thee.”
W.H. Auden wrote a poem that in its subject matter, sense of despair, and use of vernacular speech stands as a predecessor to Ferlinghetti’s rant. Auden’s title, “September 1, 1939,” refers to the day on which World War II began. Even though it was written eighty-five years ago, the poem’s opening lines somehow manage to capture the mood of hopelessness that infects the United States today.
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade.
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth….
A few lines later, Auden summarizes the cause of the war in one neat formula.
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
These lines raise a legitimate question: What can the American people expect in return for the evil their country is doing today? What kind of karma, what sort of debt load is the country accumulating now under Mr. Trump? It probably won’t take long for the people to find out.
Another poem that comes automatically to mind when considering Trump’s dismantling of democracy is W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming.”
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
These are mighty lines, and much of their content can be applied to the situation in the U.S. today. Does Trump have a clear plan in mind, or will his tariffs and other punitive measures create a wave of “mere anarchy” that will swamp the country in a “blood-dimmed tide?” How can anyone stand up to Trump’s threats and lawlessness when the traditional opposition party—the Democrats—appears to lack all sense of conviction, and the Republicans passionately suppress every attempt at protest? Things really do seem to be falling apart, if only because “the centre,” which in the U.S. has always been the so-called system of checks and balances among the three branches of government, has transformed itself into an impotent laughing-stock.
All four of the poems I have just cited illuminate the current situation in the United States by reference to ideals that are being systematically, even gleefully, violated by Donald Trump. However, none of them has a precise application to Canada, where, according to Pierre Trudeau’s famous observation, we are affected by every twitch and grunt of our elephantine neighbour. For that we have to consider a poet and a poem that are seldom read anymore, Rudyard Kipling’s “Dane-Geld.”
Kipling subtitled his poem “A.D. 980—1016.” Those dates refer to the rule of the Anglo-Saxon king, Ethelred the Unready, who tried to rid his kingdom of Danish invaders by paying them a fee to go away. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Danes were happy to take the money, but instead of staying away, they returned every year and continued to ravage the land. In one notorious incident from 1012, they took prisoner a bishop who opposed them, got drunk on pillaged wine, then beat the bishop to death with cattle bones. From such well-documented historical incidents, Kipling drew a lesson: “if once you have paid him the Dane-geld / You never get rid of the Dane.” The poem was published in 1911 and was ofted cited in the 1930s as an argument against the British government’s policy of appeasing Nazi Germany.
“Dane-Geld” contains six stanzas that are divided into groups of two by the appearance of the word “temptation” in the first line of each group. (The repeated use of “temptation” is one technique Kipling uses to define the moral landscape of his poem.) The initial group of two stanzas focuses on the Danes and their demands.
It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation,
To call upon a neighbour and to say:–
“We invaded you last night—we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.”
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!
What makes coughing up the cash such an attractive proposition is the enemy’s assurance that it will be a one-time deal. Just give us the money, and we’ll never come back. Unfortunately, it never works out that way. Once the Dane has money in hand, there is no compelling reason for him not to invade and demand to be paid again.
The second group of two stanzas provides the Anglo-Saxon rationale for appeasing their foe.
It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:–
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
The Danes were a formidable fighting force, but they were hardly invincible. King Alfred among the Anglo-Saxons and Brian Boru among the Irish were only two of several leaders who decisively defeated them on the battlefield. Fighting is always harder than writing a check, but there are times when going to war is the only possible way to achieve an honorable peace.
The last two stanzas pose the moral question: Is it right or wrong to acquiesce to the demands of a bully? Kipling implies that having a moral code and acting according to one’s ideals are just as important in politics as in personal relations.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:–
“We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!”
As negotiations drag on between Canada and the States, I have one modest recommendation to make. Hang a copy of Kipling’s poem from the wall of the Prime Minister’s Office, and from the wall of Centre Block on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Then let every one of our leaders and legislators pledge not to pay a penny of the Dane-geld that is being demanded by the Viking-in-Chief in Washington. Let us do everything we can to avoid the “oppression and shame” that will follow from compromising our ideals, which, in company with our poets, we recognize to be both beautiful and true.
Appendix
Percy Bysshe Shelley:
Sonnet: England in 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king—
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn—mud from a muddy spring—
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow—
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field—
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield—
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A Senate—Time’s worst statute unrepealed—
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
Pity the Nation
(after Kahlil Gibran)
Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation—oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty!
W. H. Auden:
September 1, 1939
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return. . . .
W. B Yeats:
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Rudyard Kipling:
Dane-Geld
A.D. 980-1016
It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation,
To call upon a neighbour and to say:–
“We invaded you last night—we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.”
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:–
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:–
“We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!”
It’s amazing that the poets do know what they’re talking about and the blind sheep to the south can’t see. Perhaps they should look to the past, 1939 Germany, to see if they can notice any similarities. Then perhaps they’ll react.
fantastic, Ed.