Literature in the News: Pope Leo XIV Quotes Gandalf

As many of you know on May 25^th, Pope Leo published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on the cautions and moral use of artificial intelligence (AI).  The encyclical established the Catholic Church’s social teaching on the use of AI, especially in regard to human dignity and the common good.  Let me say up front, I have not read the encyclical but I have read summations and excerpts.  The details of the encyclical are not the concern of this post.  What I do what to point out is the starting quote within the document.

Magnifica Humanitas contains a quote from J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic novel, Lord of the Rings.    More specifically it quotes from a piece of dialogue from one of its main characters, the character who represents wisdom and moral rectitude of the wizard, Gandalf the Grey.  After his sacrificial act of saving the fellowship at the expense of his life, Gandalf will later in a “resurrection” of sorts, return as Gandalf the White, the name change reflecting a process of purification.  But as “Gandalf the Grey” he symbolizes a man of wisdom.  Indeed, grey has long been associated with wisdom and prudence, alluding to the ancient Greek “grey-eyed” goddess of wisdom, Athena.  But I think it also associates with those of us in a particular age group of grey-haired or grey-bearded.  (Ha, that’s one of the few benefits of reaching my age!)  Where I work we sometimes refer to the experience “old-timers” as “the grey beards.” 

With that context, let’s turn to the quote:

It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.

There has been several commentaries in the public domain on why Pope Leo chose this quote.  I’m going to draw on two.

James T. Keane in writing in the Catholic magazine, America, “Why Pope Leo’s new encyclical quotes Gandalf: Literary images of hope and faith in ‘Magnifica Humanitas’ “ first offers surprise:

Of all the startling things one might find in a papal encyclical, a quote from J. R. R. Tolkien might take the cake. It’s not the first time a novel has made an appearance in such a format, as The Brothers Karamazov showed up in Pope Francis’ “Dilexit Nos,” but who would ever have thought The Lord of the Rings would appear in a magisterial document?

But there it is—a quote from Gandalf right smack in the middle of the text…As for the horrifically mixed metaphor, blame Tolkien, not the pope.

Ha!  The mixed metaphor he refers to is the “tide” metaphor which opens the quote with the tilling of soil as to the solution the tides present.  That is a mixed metaphor but Tolkien has put the quote into the mouth of Gandalf, so it would follow common speech patterns of dialogue rather than formal prose.  But even in formal prose, I personally do not find mixed metaphors problematic per se.  They become problematic if they confuse or contradict.  I don’t find that to be the case here.

Also interesting is that Pope Francis had used a quote from a novel, The Brothers Karamazov.  Over the years I had found Pope Francis to have a very good knowledge of literature.  I think recall the Holy Father quoting Dante and Borges and Cervantes.  There are others I’m sure but my memory is faulty.  He actually wrote a letter on the use of literature in the formation of priests and religious.  I published my reading of it here.  Pope Francis also had an Apostolic Letter commemorating the passing of Dante Algheri, and I published two posts on reading through it, here and here.  I don’t know if Pope Leo is as knowledgeable of literature as Pope Francis, but he is following in his footsteps on drawing from classic literature. 

Kean provides the context of Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas to show how the Tolkien (through Gandalf) quote is relevant.

Paragraph 90 [of Magnifica Humanitas] gives us the most important question: “We are called to reflect on the great ‘construction sites’ of our era and ask: What are we building?” Throughout “Magnifica Humanitas,” the two images he uses to represent the choice before us are of the Tower of Babel from Genesis and Nehemiah’s slow reconstruction of Jerusalem from the Book of Nehemiah: The first story tells of the thoughtless arrogance taken on by a humanity that sees its own glorification as the goal of existence; the second tells of the humble and painstaking act of constructing something holy, brick by brick. You can guess which one our Augustinian pope prefers.

So, concerning artificial intelligence, the central subject matter of the encyclical, Pope Leo is not innately opposed to AI, but he calls into question the manner of its use and the implications of its purport.  Pope Leo uses two opposing Biblical images to present the possibilities.  With AI, we could be building a Tower of Babel, a prideful challenge to God’s providence.  Or we could be rebuilding Jerusalem after the destruction of the Temple from the Babylonian siege.  The first is degradation of human dignity; the second is working with God for the building of human institutions.  Kean consolidates Pope Leo’s thesis.

What are we building? What are the great construction sites of our era? A tower to the heavens, the A.I. enthusiasts tell us, whether you want it or not. It can’t be stopped. Perhaps not, “Magnifica Humanitas” concedes, but it certainly doesn’t have to be a folly that destroys human solidarity forever. It could be a new work of a magnificent humanity, holy and built on the ideas and images and labors of a humanity that seeks more than simply efficiency or profit.

Could it be possible that artificial intelligence would be holy and transcend efficiency or profit?  Highly unlikely.

Joseph Pearce, writing in the National Catholic Register, “Why Pope Leo Quoted Tolkien’s Gandalf,” has a little different perspective on Pope Leo’s quote of Gandalf.

Essentially, Gandalf is saying that localism is the only effective response to globalism. None of us, as individuals, as mere pint-sized hobbits in a world of great and largely dark powers, can defeat the power of global corporations and the invasive technology that they are trying to impose upon us. “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world.”

On the other hand, we are called “to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set.” We are only called to attend to the times in which we live and to work to make the world in which we find ourselves a better place by loving and serving those around us. It is pointless worrying about how evil our own time is and equally pointless to vainly wish that things were different.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” Frodo complains to Gandalf.

“So do I,” Gandalf replies, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Other than Pearce’s touch of contemporary ideology (“localism is the only effective response to globalism”), he is identifying that Gandalf is stating that resolving the immediate needs of your neighbors will cure what is wrong with the world at large.  If everyone paid attention to one’s neighbors, the aggregate attention would bring about the Kingdom of God.  And it’s not the geographic restrictions that Pearce identifies.  He sees Gandalf’s quote temporally as well.

No, we cannot choose the time in which we are born. We might wish to have lived, as Frodo does, in more peaceful and virtuous times, unravaged by war and wickedness, but that is not for us to decide. What we do need to decide is what to do with the time that is given us in the times in which we find ourselves. In the words that Pope Leo quotes, Gandalf tells us that we cannot stop all the wars and all the wickedness, we cannot “master all the tides of the world,” but we can decide to fight wickedness where we find it in our own small sphere of influence, “uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”

In the context of the situation, Pearce sees Gandalf’s quote as containing a moral directive to Frodo.

Our calling, our responsibility, is to be good and faithful stewards of the good things we’ve been given and to be good and faithful servants of the Lord our God and of those who are our neighbors in the Shire in which we live, and of those who will be born after us.

And so, this I think is where Pope Leo is coming from.  Artificial Intelligence requires a moral responsibility to not use it in a prideful, self-centered way, and to consider the benefits to the common good that it could contain as a glorification of God. 

 

Literature in the News: Dantedì

Dantedì refers to the holiday celebrating the great Italian poet, Dante Alighieri.  

From the website, ItalianTraditions. 

March 25th is celebrated throughout Italy on Dantedì, the national day dedicated to Dante Alighieri, father of the Italian language and author of the Divine Comedy. This date is not random: scholars recognize it as the day the otherworldly journey begins narrated in his masterpiece, a universal symbol of search, redemption and knowledge.

Established in 2020, Dantedì represents a precious opportunity to rediscover the current events of Dante and the value of his work. It is not just a tribute to literature, but a moment to reflect on Italian cultural identity and the power of the word as tool for thinking and transformation.

Well, that is incomplete.  In a day to reflect on the value of Dante’s Divine Comedy and on the Italy’s deep and grand culture, but also on today’s date, the traditional date assigned to the Blessed Virgin Mary assent to being the Mother of God.  So today is a confluence of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the day Dante the character spent in Hell.  Of course it’s not a coincidence.  It is widely known that Dante the author starts the pilgrimage of Dante the character on Good Friday of the year 1300.  What is not as widely well known, though growing in circulation, is that Good Friday of the year 1300 happened to be March 25^th, which would make it on the same day as the Feast of the Annunciation.  So the greatest Catholic poem ever written, also the greatest Italian poem ever written—heck, the greatest poem, period, ever written—sets the start of the action on both Good Friday and the Feast of the Annunciation.

On this Feast Day primarily of the Annunciation and secondarily of Dantedì, I wish to commemorate with first let’s start with a clip from the great Zeffirelli movie, Jesus of Nazareth, the Annunciation scene.

 

Second, I want to quote from the beginning of Dante’s Inferno, the first canto where Dante the character is lost in a wood.  From the wonderful Hollander and Hollander translation which can be found at the Princeton Dante Project.

 

              1            Midway in the journey of our life

2            I came to myself in a dark wood,

3            for the straight way was lost.

4            Ah, how hard it is to tell

5            the nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh --

6            the very thought of it renews my fear!

7            It is so bitter death is hardly more so.

              8            But to set forth the good I found

9            I will recount the other things I saw.

10         How I came there I cannot really tell,

11         I was so full of sleep

12         when I forsook the one true way.

13         But when I reached the foot of a hill,

14         there where the valley ended

15         that had pierced my heart with fear,

16         looking up, I saw its shoulders

17         arrayed in the first light of the planet

18         that leads men straight, no matter what their road.

19         Then the fear that had endured

20         in the lake of my heart, all the night

21         I spent in such distress, was calmed.

22         And as one who, with laboring breath,

23         has escaped from the deep to the shore

24         turns and looks back at the perilous waters,

25         so my mind, still in flight,

26         turned back to look once more upon the pass

27         no mortal being ever left alive.

28         After I rested my wearied flesh a while,

29         I took my way again along the desert slope,

30         my firm foot always lower than the other.

                             Inferno, Canto 1, 1-30.

Finally, hear Dante’s beautiful Italian with a recitation of Inferno’s Canto 1 by the great Italian actor, Roberto Benigni.

Blessed Mother, ever Virgin, pray for us.

Literature in the News: 100th Anniversary of Flannery O’Connor’s Birth

March 25^th was not only the Feast Day of the Annunciation, but also the anniversary of the birth of Flannery O’Connor.  And this year, 2025, marked the 100^th anniversary.  In another post I’m going to provide my analysis of a short story of hers I recently read, “The Displaced Person,” a story you may not have ever heard except if you’re a big devotee of her work.  Before I get to that, I’m going to do a commemoration of her life.  She remains a model for me as a Catholic writer.

 

The Smithsonian Magazine has a beautiful tribute to her life and work, with lots of pictures and a couple of embedded videos.  In her short life of thirty-nine years she produced 31 short stories, two published novels, another novel that was unfinished but posthumously published, letters, journals, essays, and other writings.  Apparently she sat down to write every day which is what a good writer needs to do.  She has been quite influential.  From the Smithsonian article titled, “Flannery O’Connor Wanted to Shake Her Readers Awake. Her Family Wanted Her to Write theNext ‘Gone With the Wind’” by Ellen Wexler:

 

March 25, 2025, would have been O’Connor’s 100th birthday. As the many events and exhibitions surrounding her centenary attest, interest in the author’s work has only deepened since her death in 1964 at age 39. In recent years, scholars have published her prayer journal and her unfinished novel; her life has been the subject of the award-winning documentary Flannery and a star-studded 2023 biographical drama. Her influence on American culture is unparalleled: O’Connor’s stories have inspired writers such as Cormac McCarthy, Alice Munro, Alice McDermott and George Saunders; musicians like Bruce Springsteen, Lucinda Williams, Sufjan Stevens and Josh Ritter; and filmmakers like the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino.

To be frank, I only know her work from her short stories, of which I have read about ten.  I’ve posted detailed analysis of two of her short stories here on Ashes From Burnt Roses, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” in three posts, (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) and “Greenleaf” in two posts (Part 1, Part 2).  Feel free to peruse the posts.

There are some interesting insights in Ellen Wexler’s piece.  She really condenses O’Connor’s vision of fiction into this quote she takes from an O’Connor essay.

 

“People are always complaining that the modern novelist has no hope and that the picture he paints of the world is unbearable,” she wrote in an essay titled “The Nature and Aim of Fiction.” “The only answer to this is that people without hope do not write novels. … I’m always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.”

That essay, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” is an important read for writers, and more on that later.  Wexler continues on O’Connor’s philosophy of great fiction.

She relished in the unusual and the mysterious, arguing that the ability to understand good fiction belonged only to the “kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.”

Mystery deepened by reality, reality deepened by mystery.  That’s almost like looking into a mirror and the mirror looking into another mirror.  As a writer, O’Connor believed fiction should be brutally honest and avoid sentimentality. 

“Flannery saw in Catholicism and in her Southern culture a strong inclination to avoid honesty,” says Bruce Gentry, editor of the Flannery O’Connor Review at Georgia College & State University. “Her own unflinching honesty was a reaction against the extremities of Catholic piety and Southern niceness. She might not have gone so far with her honesty if she weren’t inclined to fix the groups she belonged to.”

Wexler concludes O’Connor’s vision of fiction with an understanding that the work needs to reach a moment of redemption.

O’Connor believed that redemption often came “at considerable cost,” an idea that’s “implicit in the Christian view of the world.” As such, her characters can’t reach their moments of reckoning on their own. Instead, they need a push. They need to be shaken awake. O’Connor’s job was to do the shaking.

O’Connor would wind up falling ill with Lupus, the genetic disease that killed her father, and thus ending her promising life in the literary centers of the country.  She was forced to move down to her mother’s house in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she would write her best work, all the while suffering from the debilitating disease.  Lupus would ultimately kill her too at the age of 39.  Wexler’s well-written article takes you through her life, her approach to writing, and through some of her work.

This is a great little TED-ED short video summing up why you should read Flannery O'Connor.

###

In her essay, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” O’Connor highlights the various elements of what she conceptualizes as the art of fiction.   I’m not going to go through everything she says, but one of the most important elements is the ability of the writer to create an experience through the story and one does that by use of the five senses.  She gives an example from Gustave Flaubert’s novel, Madam Bovary.

All the sentences in Madame Bo"Vary could be examined with wonder, but there is one in particular that always stops me in admiration. Flaubert has just shown us Emma at the piano with Charles watching her. He says, "She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff's clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand."

Why is this sentence so arresting?  O’Connor finds it amazing that the piano sound buzzes in the room while a clerk at the other end of town in his “list slippers” hears it.  A detail of sound, one of the five senses, in one room that we cannot visually see but can see pressing of the keys, incorporating both the auditory and visual senses, travels across town to a clerk that we can also visually see, across some distance of space hearing the auditory sound.  In addition, we don’t actually hear the piano, since it’s only an allusion with words on a page, but we imagine the sound as readers in our minds.  She sums this up with, “It's always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks.”

It is this accumulation of detail—details selected for purpose—that creates the story.  She will go on to tell what kind of vision of details the story writer needs to have.  I don’t have the time and space for this but let me jump to her conclusion when it comes to details.

People have a habit of saying, "What is the theme of your story?" and they expect you to give them a statement: "The theme of my story is the economic pressure of the machine on the middle class"—or some such absurdity. And when they've got a statement like that, they go off happy and feel it is no longer necessary to read the story. 

Some people have the notion that you read the story and then climb out of it into the meaning, but for the fiction writer himself the wholes tory is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction. 

That is speaking of story by what it is not, but O’Connor feels that is the best way for a teacher to pass on the craft of storytelling.  She does finally explain that the art of any medium has been explained by St. Thomas Aquinas.

St. Thomas called art "reason in making." This is a very cold and very beautiful definition, and if it is unpopular today, this is because reason has lost ground among us. As grace and nature have been separated, so imagination and reason have been separated, and this always means an end to art. The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees. For him, to be reasonable is to find, in the object, in the situation, in the sequence, the spirit which makes it itself. This is not an easy or simple thing to do. It is to intrude upon the timeless, and that is only done by the violence of a single- minded respect for the truth.

It seems to suggest that the artist is trying to apply reason to human characters and situation to find what is truth in them and their fate.  It is not thematic but experiential.  I will show how she does this in my upcoming analysis of her short story, “The Displaced Person.”

###

And so, after one hundred years of her birth, let us not saddened by her early death and the huge loss to literature, but let us be thankful for what she gave us in her short life, a wealth of fiction of the highest art.

Literature in the News: T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” the 100th Year Anniversary

It crossed my attention that the great T.S. Eliot poem, The Waste Land, had its 100^th anniversary of its publication this October.  I would like to commemorate the anniversary with two posts actually.  This post, and then I want to post one of my poetry analyses of a section of the poem.  Only a section.  The poem, which is divided into five parts, contains 434 lines, and I would add densely packed lines of meaning.  That’s just too much for one poetry analysis.

So in this commemorative post, I’d just like to summarize the importance of The Waste Land.  A place to start is perhaps from the Yale university site, Modernism Lab, a site devoted to modernist literature.  From their article, “The Waste Land,” by Pericles Lewis.

 

The Waste Land was quickly recognized as a major statement of modernist poetics, both for its broad symbolic significance and for Eliot’s masterful use of formal techniques that earlier modernists had only begun to attempt. The critic I. A. Richards influentially praised Eliot for describing the shared post-war “sense of desolation, of uncertainty, of futility, of the groundlessness of aspirations, of the vanity of endeavour, and a thirst for a life-giving water which seems suddenly to have failed.” Eliot later complained that “approving critics” like Richards “said that I had expressed ‘the disillusionment of a generation,’ which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention.” Nonetheless, it was as a representative of a postwar generation that Eliot became famous. To compare Eliot’s comments on the poem with the way it was received illustrates strikingly the fact that, as William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley put it, “The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public.” The Waste Land made use of allusion, quotation (in several languages), a variety of verse forms, and a collage of poetic fragments to create the sense of speaking for an entire culture in crisis; it was quickly accepted as the essential statement of that crisis and the epitome of a modernist poem.

Let me use that passage to highlight the elements and significance of the poem.  The first thing to point out is that the poem had a great influence on subsequent poetry and literature.  It is a difficult poem to read for (1) it’s fragmentary style and (2) heavy use of allusion, often obscure allusions.  I will point out in my future post why both these elements of the poem’s style are important.  On the other hand, it can be an easier poem to understand because the lines are frequently, if not mostly, prosaic.  Concentrated lines that must fit meter, line length, and rhyme scheme sometimes can be difficult to unpack.  Eliot’s individual lines are simpler.  But the frequent dislocations between parts and subparts can leave the reader bewildered.  Modernism was looking for an aesthetic to convey the particular nature of our contemporary life, and Eliot’s poem and James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, both published in 1922, are the two works cited that define Modernism.

Second, the poem captured the disillusionment of an age.  Eliot undercuts that thought in the quote inside that passage, but the central image of a waste land was perfect for capturing the post-World War I life.  It invoked the image of the trench warfare battlefield, desolated from destruction.  The war was devastating to the European nations, and it seemed like such a “waste” of a generation of men that the title rang perfectly true.  People were disillusioned in many ways, from the ideals of the war, from their governments, from life in general.  This disillusionment allowed the elements in the culture that were tearing down tradition (anti-religion, pseudo-psychology, anti-family—the same as now!) to establish themselves as normative.  The worst elements of the Enlightenment were disrupting society, and that causes disillusionment in one’s traditions.  The poem really did capture a disillusionment.  As an aside, it’s no better today, if not worse!

 

Third, the poem shaped literature for the next century, and still does.  There are countless references, allusions, and emulations to The Waste Land in novels, poetry, drama, and even film.  From poets.org, in their review of “What the Thunder Said: How The Waste Land Made Poetry Modern” the legacy of Eliot’s poem is summarized as such:

 

The Waste Land has a double legacy. It’s the milestone that vaulted its author to considerable fame and influence, culminating with the Nobel Prize in 1948. It has held a permanent place in the pantheon of modern poetry since its publication in 1922. It has been an intimidating lump in the syllabus for generations of undergraduates, and a chastening puzzle to graduate students. But The Waste Land is not only a poem; it names an event, like a tornado or an earthquake. Its publication was a watershed, marking a before and after. It was a poem unequivocal in its declaration that the ancient art of poetry had become modern.

 

It would be a major undertaking to detail the legacy of The Waste Land.  Novelists such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, Ford Maddox Ford, and more, would have strong allusions to the poem in their works.  Poets such as W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath owe much to the style and themes of The Waste Land.  Indeed, the very opening from traditional poetic forms can be traced to the poem.  In that respect, so much of the 20^th century’s poetry bears a direct influence to Eliot and his poem.  And in drama, let’s not forget that Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot owes much in theme and setting to the 1922 poem.

 

I should also mention that the title is The Waste Land, in two words, not “The Wasteland” as I have been historically prone to write.  Eliot himself was very specific about this.  From the website, T.S. Eliot:

 

The title, by the way, is not 'The Wasteland' but 'The Waste Land'. The only exact translation of the title is one which my French translator, Jean de Menasce, discovered, although alas! too late to use in his version – 'La Gaste Lande'. This is absolutely the exact equivalent as it alludes to the same mediaeval fiction.

 

(Eliot in a letter to Angel Flores, 22 February 1928)

 

Finally, here are some of my favorite passages from the poem.

 

From Part I, “The Burial of the Dead”:

 

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.  (ll. 19-30)

 

From Part II, “A Game of Chess”:

 

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble, where the glass

Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines

From which a golden Cupidon peeped out

(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)

Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra

Reflecting light upon the table as

The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,

From satin cases poured in rich profusion;

In vials of ivory and coloured glass

Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,

Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused

And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air

That freshened from the window, these ascended

In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,

Flung their smoke into the laquearia,

Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.

Huge sea-wood fed with copper

Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,

In which sad light a carvéd dolphin swam. (ll. 77-96)

 

 

From Part III, “The Fire Sermon”:

 

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits

Like a taxi throbbing waiting,

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights

Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

Out of the window perilously spread

Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,

On the divan are piled (at night her bed)

Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs

Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—

I too awaited the expected guest.  (ll. 215-30)

 

From Part IV, “Death By Water”:

 

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.  (ll. 315-18)

 

 

From Part V, “What the Thunder Said”:

 

Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road

The road winding above among the mountains

Which are mountains of rock without water

If there were water we should stop and drink

Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand

If there were only water amongst the rock

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain

There is not even solitude in the mountains

But red sullen faces sneer and snarl

From doors of mudcracked houses  (ll. 331-45)

 

 

If you haven’t read it recently (or ever!) you can read it at Poetry Foundation.

 

After reading it, then listen to what I consider the definitive rendition by Jeremy Irons and Eileen Atkins.  Irons reads the male voices and the narrator’s voice while Atkins reads the female voices. 

 

 

 

Shantih, shantih, shantih. 

Literature in the News: Debate on Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts”

I came across this interesting reaction to an explication of W. H. Auden’s great poem “Musee des Beaux Arts”.  The retort was from Lee Segal reacting in his article in City Journal, “Misreading Auden: About suffering, and art, the NewYork Times is usually wrong,” against an article in The New York Times by Elisa Gabbert interpreting Auden’s poem, “A Poem (and a Painting) About the Suffering That Hides in Plain Sight.”   

Now to be fair, I cannot read Gabbart’s initial essay since I do not subscribe to the Times, and my number of free views to one of their articles has exceeded their policy, so I can only go by Segal’s characterization of her interpretation.  But perhaps you can read the Times article, and, if so, please correct me if I am unfair.  I found the exchange interesting, mainly because I happen to love this poem.  But set aside Segal's polemic against the politically Liberal point of view from the newspaper and the author.  I don't want to get into that.  Let me give you my view.

First the poem, and I can publish it since it’s in the public domain.

 

Musee des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden

 

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

 

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

 

I really can’t do better than the short explanation of the poem given in Wikipedia’s entry.  

 

Auden's free verse poem is divided into two parts, the first of which describes scenes of "suffering" and "dreadful martyrdom" which rarely break into our quotidian routines: "While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully / along." The second half of the poem refers, through the poetic device of ekphrasis, to the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c. 1560s), at the time thought to be by Bruegel, but now usually regarded as an early copy of a lost work. Auden's description allows us to visualize this specific moment and instance of the indifference of others to a distant individual's suffering, inconsequent to them, "how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster ... the white legs disappearing into the green." The disaster in question is the fall of Icarus, caused by his flying too close to the sun and melting his waxen wings.

So there are two parts to the poem, both which are expressions on the theme that humanity just moves on from tragedies all around us.  The Wikipedia entry states the poem as giving us instances “of the indifference of others to a distant individual's suffering, inconsequent to them.”  The entry goes on to say the poem is in two parts.  The first part give some random, mundane examples of tragedies we seem to ignore, and the second part, an “ekphrasis,”—that is a description of a work of a visual art—of “Landscapewith the Fall of Icarus” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.    

So before I get to Segal and Gabbert, here is Bruegel’s painting.

For those that don’t get the allusion, the painting references the ancient Greek myth of Icarus where Daedalus, a master craftsman, builds wings for him and his son Icarus to escape from the island of Crete through flight.  But Icarus being young and headstrong flies too high and the sun melts the wings and he plunges into the sea to his death.  In the lower right of the painting you can see Icarus feet just before he submerges.

So I think one could summarize the difference between Segal’s and Gabbert’s interpretations is over the word “indifference.”  Segal states Gabbert’s interpretation of the poem with this paragraph.

 

No work of art can be summed up in a series of categorical statements about its “message,” but Gabbert tells us that Auden’s poem is a straightforward exposure of people who let bad things happen—she is perhaps thinking of Ukraine—and do nothing. “Ignoring [human suffering],” she writes, in a summary of Auden’s intentions in writing the poem, “is the most natural thing in the world. It is also a moral error.”

He later chides her for confusing the theme of the painting with the theme of the poem.

 

Gabbert does not refer to Auden’s religious beliefs, and when she does take up the poem’s allusions to Christian motifs, she gets them wrong. “The painting,” she writes, both confusing the poem with the painting and the painting’s own possible meanings, “is about the fraught relation between attention and disaster—as is the poem: Something’s only a disaster if we notice it.” Yet in the painting, Icarus’s fall is still a disaster, though no one sees it. And in the poem, Christ’s “dreadful martyrdom” and Icarus’s fall are still disasters, though no one sees them. Auden even refers to the boy’s fall as a “disaster.”

Segal’s interpretation of the painting is subtly different.  The indifference is not a callousness nor uncaring but an acceptance.

 

The poem is not about the “fraught relation between attention and disaster,” whatever that means. It is about disaster and suffering happening in the midst of lives untouched by disaster and suffering. Auden writes, “About suffering they were never wrong/The Old Masters: how well they understood its human position; how it takes place/While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking along.” The poem describes how even Christ’s torture happened obscurely, mundanely: “even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course . . . in some untidy spot/Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse/Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”

 

Gabbert believes that the Old Masters, in the manner of editorial writers, were bothered by the fact that suffering was “easy to ignore.” For Auden, though, the Old Masters understood suffering’s “human position.” Blindness or indifference to suffering isn’t an error easily corrected by an adjustment to your moral posture. It is a profoundly ambiguous and complex essence of being human.

I would quibble with Segal’s “It is about disaster and suffering happening in the midst of lives untouched by disaster and suffering.”  “Untouched by disaster and suffering”?  Who’s life is untouched by disaster and suffering?  Everyone is touched.  Nonetheless Segal sees the indifference as a “complex essence of being human.”  He goes on to explain it further.

 

For in Bruegel’s painting, the ploughman is paying absolute attention to his work; the fisherman is absolutely fixed on fishing; the sailors are completely caught up in sailing, and “the sun shone as it had to.” Rather than a spectacle of selfishness, these people and nature itself are “forgetting themselves in a function,” which is a form of agape, of love for the work of living. Even the sun, so destructive to Icarus on the one hand, nourishes the life-giving seeds the farmer is planting in the earth on the other. Perhaps we cannot fulfill the saintly idea of loving our neighbor, but we can, in the ordinary motions of our lives, perform the work at hand, and thus cause no harm to our fellows, even if, the human condition being what it is, we do not possess the capacity to relieve suffering whenever and wherever we witness it. Maybe that is why the ploughman is the largest figure in the painting, occupying the foreground nearly in the center of the picture. “No one having laid the hand upon the plow, and looking on the things behind, is fit for the kingdom of God,” as Luke 9:62 has it. Surely Auden knew that exhortation to keep your eye on the work of God; on, that is, the work of earning the gift of your portion of mortal existence.

I think Segal is saying that the poem sees tragedies are part of the universal order.   Tragedies which lead to human suffering happen all the time and are part of the human condition, so the indifference is not a moral failing but an understanding that suffering is just as routine as the mundane, human activity we all participate in.  It is part of God’s order.  If that’s what he is saying, and I’m not exactly sure what he means by “a profoundly ambiguous and complex essence of being human,” then I agree, “the dreadful martyrdom must run its course.”