by Linda Gregerson

from TriQuarterly, Issue 129

In 41 BC, having defeated his enemies in the civil wars that followed upon the assassination of his great-uncle and adoptive father Julius Caesar, Octavius declared a general amnesty. Among those who took advantage of this amnesty to return to Rome and pick up the pieces of their lives again was one Quintus Horatius Flaccus, aged 24. He had been a student in Athens when Julius Caesar was killed and had, in the general fervor of republican reform, joined Brutus's army and served as military tribune until the disastrous defeat at Philippi in 42 BC. Horace was penniless when he returned to Rome, his father having died and his father's estates having been confiscated as a result of his own ill-starred career as a patriot in rebellion. What was left of his inheritance he wore on his back, or in his head, for his father—himself a freedman—had made considerable sacrifices to provide Horace with the most fungible and disaster-proof sort of wealth he could imagine, with a superb education. Horace became a scribe, or quaester's clerk, upon his return to Rome, but his real advancement came about through the friendship of poets. It was Virgil and Varius who introduced the young Horace, momentously, to Maecenas, senior advisor to Octavius and patron of the arts. It was Maecenas who bestowed upon Horace the Sabine farm, which became not only a source of stable income for the rest of the poet's life but also a touchstone of spiritual sustenance and renewal.

Maecenas is abundantly present in Horace's written works. He is recurrently addressed, he is praised, he is thanked. His name is the first word in the first poem of the first of Horace's books of Odes: "Maecenas, you, descended from many kings, /O you who are my stay and my delight. . . ." This poem proceeds to inventory the varieties of human calling or estate—athlete, statesman, lord of vast acreage, humble farmer, merchant, idler, soldier, hunter—and to conclude with the poet's own vocation:

What links me to the gods is that I study
To wear the ivy wreath that poets wear.
The cool sequestered grove in which I play
For nymphs and satyrs dancing to my music

Is where I am set apart from other men—
Unless the muse Euterpe takes back the flute
Or Polyhymnia untunes the lyre.
But if you say I am truly among the poets,

Then my exalted head will knock against the stars.

        (Horace, Ode I . I, trans. David Ferry)

So the poet's place—not merely his means of sustenance and habitus, his villa in the Sabine Hills, nor even his claim to honor and attention, but his very "link to the gods"—is the abounding gift of patronage. The encomium so central to ode acknowledges tribute paid in varying coin: in acreage, in money, in public virtue, in eloquence and fame. The poet looks to his patron for recognition in material terms and also in judgment; he gives in exchange the ode. I name you Maecenas, and you name me poet.

The history of the ode is governed by two rhetorical poles: large-scale public address and intimate meditation. The thread I wish chiefly to examine here is that which links the ode, throughout its rhetorical spectrum, to the seats of public power. In its origin, the ode is linked to those most public of public events, the civic drama and festivals of ancient Greece. Pindar (522-442 B.C.), who is generally credited with devising the form, wrote his odes to celebrate athletic victories, the three-part structure of the poem corresponding to three movements of the chorus by whom it was sung: a strophe, in which the chorus moved from left to right, an antistrophe, in which the chorus moved from right to left, and an epode, in which the chorus stood still. In subsequent centuries, the Pindaric ode came to be associated with other large-scale public observances: the unveiling of monuments, the formal accession of an emperor, the ceremony of state funerals. The Horatian ode is simpler in structure and often more modest in subject, a single repeated stanza form that may function as a drinking song, an invitation to dinner, or a celebration of fleshly dalliance. In the course of two and a half millennia, the ode has assumed many formal incarnations—tripartite, homostrophic, and, in later periods, much looser and irregular. Its most enduring feature has been not form but occasion. The ode offers praise to a ruler, a patron, an athlete, a friend, to drink or childhood or a Grecian urn. It casts itself as the lyricist speaking-in-public. Coupling with occasion, it marks the boundaries of the self and the social.

And even in its earliest manifestations, the ode has accommodated tonalities and apprehensions that complicate the tautological circuits of patronage and praise. In the third ode of the first book, Horace calls down blessings upon the journey of his friend Virgil to Greece.

May Venus goddess of Cyprus and may the brothers
Castor and Pollux, the shining stars, the calmers,
Guard you, O ship, and be the light of guidance;
May the father of the winds restrain all winds
Except the gentle one that favors this journey.
Bring Virgil, your charge, the other half of my heart,
Safely to the place where he is going.

        (Horace, Ode I . 3, trans. David Ferry)

But even as he praises the history of human navigation and the courage of men who venture upon the seas, the poet finds himself in darker, more ambivalent territory. He considers those who brave the elements and venture into forbidden realms—the "impious" sailor, "guileful Prometheus," "audacious Daedalus"—as tempting the gods. He modulates from benison to warning: "Is it any wonder, then, that Jupiter rages, / Hurling down lightning, shaking the sky with thunder?" It becomes the business of ode, even as it plays the chords of well-wishing and affiliation, to contemplate the limits of human ambition and to issue implicit counsel.

Moving further in this direction, odes may offer frank instruction to figures conspicuous in the public eye. Ben Jonson's "Ode to Sir William Sidney," written to celebrate the latter's twenty-first birthday in the year 1611, is an example in kind. William was son to Robert Sidney, Lord Lisle, grandson to Henry Sidney, sometime Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and nephew to Sir Philip Sidney, who was still remembered, in the disillusioned second decade of Jacobean England, as the flower, the consummate poet-courtier-military hero, of the Elizabethan age. Twenty-five years after Philip Sidney's death, his family was still important as a wellspring of literary patronage. But William, having inherited this luminous mantle and having recently attained his own majority, had to date led a conspicuously lackluster career.

Jonson begins by raising a congratulatory toast ("Give me my cup. . . from the Thespian well") but quickly turns to cautionary advice:

This day says, then, the number of glad years
          Are justly summed, that make you man:
                    Your vow
                    Must now
          Strive all right ways it can
To outstrip your peers:
          Since he doth lack
          Of going back
          Little, whose will
          Doth urge him to run wrong, or to stand still.
. . .

'Twill be exacted of your name, whose son,
          Whose nephew, whose grandchild you are;
                    And men
                    Will then
          Say you have followed far,
When well begun;
          Which must be now:
          They teach you how.
                    And he that stays
                    To live until tomorrow hath lost two days.

         (The Forest 14; published as part of the 1616 Folio of
          Jonson's Works)

Jonson was a master of the ruthless compliment. He had a keen sense of his own worth and of his dependence upon sources of sustenance—the public stage, the private masquing halls, the circuits of aristocratic praise—toward which he felt decidedly mixed emotions. He expected public stricture to be recognized as value-for-money.

American poets have generally been wary of "forcing the Muse" in the service of public occasion. We do not commemorate the Queen's birthday; the patronage systems to which we subscribe (foundation grants and universities rather than private purses) earn thanks on the acknowledgments page rather than in the body of our poems. However beset or driven by public intersections, the American lyric has largely grounded its authority in inwardness. Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Ode (Inscribed to W. H. Channing)" voices the national (and personal) ambivalence explicitly. First published in 1847, Emerson's "Ode" was dedicated to a clergyman and fellow abolitionist who had urged Emerson to become more active in the anti-slavery movement. The "Ode" begins with an ostensible demurral and apology:

Though loath to grieve
The evil time's sole patriot
I cannot leave
My honied thought
For the priest's cant,
Or statesman's rant.

If I refuse
My study for their politique,
Which at the best is trick,
The angry Muse
Puts confusion in my brain.

Emerson felt as keenly as did Channing that the times were evil, that slaveholding was the work of "jackals" and the current war with Mexico a naked act of aggression, that both slavery and the war were stains upon the country, its ideals, and its future:

Virtue palters; Right is hence;
Freedom praised, but hid;
Funeral eloquence
Rattles the coffin-lid.

But he differed with his friend on the deeper diagnosis and thus on the prospects of cure:

What boots thy zeal,
O glowing friend,
That would indignant rend
The northland from the south?
Wherefore? To what good end?
Boston Bay and Bunker Hill
Would serve things still;—
. . .
Things are in the saddle
And ride mankind.

In a world enslaved by "things," Emerson seems to argue, the poet has a more important role to play than that of political activist, however worthy the cause; his function as exemplar and public conscience exceeds the mere exigencies of topical engagement. "Everyone to his chosen work," writes the poet: the "shopman," the "senator," and the servant of the Muse pursue distinct imperatives. But where does this leave the disposition of public affairs? And where does it leave historical perspective? Such transcendence as seems to be at work (the "over-god") "marries Right to Might. . . exterminates / Races by stronger races, / Black by white faces . . . " This does not bode well. And the Muse, who has seemed to scorn the public forum and its noisy methods, finds herself at the climax of Emerson's ode "astonished" by the force of collective uprising in a distant land:

The Cossack eats Poland,
Like stolen fruit;
Her last noble is ruined,
Her last poet mute:
Straight, into double band
The victors divide;
Half for freedom strike and stand;—
The astonished Muse finds thousands at her side.

Emerson's sympathies are clear: he bitterly reproaches the nation, his nation, for failing to live up to its promise; he condemns the predations of private greed and expanding empire. But his critique is fraught with ironies and ever in motion: he writes a polemical poem that begins with the renunciation of public polemic; he adapts a public mode (the ode) to reconfigure skeptically the very foundations of public sphere.

Poets love to construe themselves as oppositional, at odds with public decorums and public affairs. But recent decades suggest that American poets are no longer convinced that civic scale and private consciousness, philosophical reach and local idiom, historical imagination and lyric authenticity, are inherently inimical to one another. Nor that public speaking must suppress an active and critical mind. Robert Hass's ode to the English language is keenly aware of the vested heritage in which it works: the teeth and vocal cords, the goose quills and printers' templates, the consciousness and material embodiments through which each word has passed to be here, in our heads and our hearts, the gorgeous, resilient, capacious, bullying, agent-of-capitalist-expansion global tongue it is our privilege and our burden to inherit. "English: An Ode" appears in Sun under Wood (1996) and is composed in eleven sections. It begins rather slyly:

1.

     ¿De quien son las piedras del rio
que ven tus ojos, habitante?

Tiene un espejo la mañana.

"The lines in Spanish," we are told in an endnote, "come from a poem by the Mexican poet Pura López Colomé in her book Un Cristal en Otro, Ediciones Toledo, Mexico City, 1989." Which is all very well, but the reader who does not happen to understand Spanish may wish the note had gone a little further. That reader, however, is required to wait: a gentle reminder of the waiting that immigrants everywhere are likely to encounter.

2.

Jodhpurs: from a state in northeast India,
for the riding breeches of the polo-playing English.

English at last, as promised by the title. But what sort of English? English based on tributary languages: the English of empire. We begin to sense some sort of lesson. And indeed, the format of the poem has begun to assume the format of a common instructional tool, of a primer or a dictionary.

Dhoti: once the dress of the despised,
it is practically a symbol of folk India.
One thinks of blood flowering in Gandhi's
after the zealot shot him.

The dhoti was not Gandhi's native garb but a garment deliberately recuperated from indigenous India, a garment Gandhi assumed and encouraged others to assume, indeed to produce, by hand and domestically, as part of the resistance to British occupation and British commerce. The dhoti was the centerpiece of economic boycott, national aspiration, and symbolic solidarity across caste lines in mid-twentieth-century India. But the alternately championed and exploited poor are scarcely unique to India. Rather than using the old term, "untouchables," or the official term, "dalits," to identify the traditional wearers of the dhoti, Hass calls them by a name that travels across otherwise-disparate cultures all too well: "despised."

Were one, therefore, to come across a child's primer. . .

Note the use of the subjunctive; note the unspecified subject "one." Note the naming, inside the posited hypothetical, of the object—"primer"—whose existence has been implied by the format of the preceding lines.

Were one, therefore, to come across a child's primer
a rainy late winter afternoon in a used bookshop
in Hyde Park. . .

Note the burnished, English-sounding name, and note, or fail to note until a little later, the slightly cloudy crossed-signal, because Hyde Park in London is not a site for used bookshops.

    . . . and notice, in fine script,
fading, on the title page,
"Susanna Mansergh, The Lodge, Little Shelford, Cmbs."
and underneath it, a fairly recent ball-point
in an adult hand: Anna Sepulveda Garcia—sua libra
and flip through pages which asseverate,
in captions enhanced by lively illustrations,
that Jane wears jodhpurs, while Derek wears a dhoti,

And note how the hypothetical primer in the hypothetical bookshop has begun to assume material weight:

it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume a political implication,

lost, perhaps, on the children of Salvadoran refugees
studying English in a housing project in Chicago.

Chicago! That Hyde Park! Some of us will have suspected as much, and will be pleased, in our little way, to have our suspicion confirmed, to have recognized the neighborhood or even the bookstore itself. We find it reassuring (political implications here as well) to find ourselves possessed of local knowledge. One was not wrong, of course, to detect the aura of Englishness: a neighborhood in Chicago named for a park in London bespeaks the complex nostalgias and braveries of colonial emulation. Old imperium: the English in India. Older imperium: the English in North America. Newer imperium: America in El Salvador, and refugees in America. The movement of populations, and of language, follows the trajectories laid down by money and force.

The poem's next hypothetical is a "high school math teacher" imagined as a way of filling in the outline of Anna Sepulveda Garcia, second owner of the primer.

. . . a former high school math teacher
from San Salvador whose sister, a secretary in the diocesan office
of the Christian Labor Movement, was found
in an alley with her neck broken, and who therefore
followed her elder brother to Chicago and, perhaps,

Note the "perhaps," the announced continuation of hypothesis.

                                                     . . . perhaps
bought a child's alphabet book in a used bookstore
near the lake where it had languished for thirty years
since the wife, perhaps, of an Irish professor of Commonwealth
     History
at the university had sold it in 1959 . . .

Irish: Mansergh. A yet-earlier colonialism, which is why the Irish speak English today, and why an Irishman might find himself earning a living teaching Commonwealth History in a distinguished American university. The reader who does a little searching online may discover traces of the late Nicholas Mansergh, born in Tipperary to a family of Anglo-Irish (i.e., Cromwellian) origins, honored denizen of Oxford and Cambridge, author of scholarly studies on The Commonwealth Experience, The Irish Question, and Constitutional Relations between Britain and India. (One may also read the political speeches of his son Martin Mansergh, Irish civil servant and diplomat, still very much alive today.) Empire leaves a convoluted aftermath.

—Math, as it turned out,
when she looked up the etymology
comes from an Anglo-Saxon word for mowing.

How shall the poet imagine an interlocking fate for Susannah Mansergh, first owner of the alphabet book, child of privilege from Little Shelford, Cambridgeshire, and Anna Sepulveda Garcia, who bought it second-hand? Privilege only extends so far: "maybe the child died / of some childhood cancer—maybe she outgrew the primer" and her mother sold it and was later depressed. "Probably she hated Chicago anyway," the mother, that is, who hailed from Ireland or England or both,

And, browsing, embittered, among the volumes on American history
She somehow felt she should be reading,
thought Wisconsin, Chicago: they killed them
and took their language and then they used it
to name the places that they've taken.

"There are those who think," writes the poet, "it's in fairly bad taste / to make habitual reference to social and political problems / in poems." In such an intellectual climate, the author of an ode must stay several steps ahead of earnestness. He may couch his observations in resourceful hypotheticals. He may work a witty hybrid of fact and fabrication. He may distribute point-ot-view: it is Anna who flees for safety; it is Susannah's mother who notes the ironies of New World naming. He may pull a narrative coup: observing "far less objection" when imaginative literature stages an "accidental death" than when it succumbs to "moral nagging," he may unceremoniously kill off a central character: "'Helen Mansergh was thinking about Rilke's pronouns / which may be why she never saw the taxi.' "

Etymology is a river, whose tributaries bind us to farflung daily habits and patterns of observation, all of them local, all of them borne from one locality, of time or place or affection, to another:

In one of Hardy's poems, a man named "Drummer Hodge,"
born in Lincolnshire where the country word
for twilight was dimpsy two centuries ago,
was a soldier buried in Afghanistan.

How is it that a boy from Lincolnshire (or Moscow or New Jersey) finds himself transplanted to Afghanistan?

Some war that had nothing to do with him.

Empire requires it. And the fallen were not, in earlier eras, brought home, as witness the roadside epitaphs of ancient Rome. As witness the humbler grave of a British drummer boy:

Face up according to the custom of his people
so that Hardy could imagine him gazing forever
into foreign constellations. Cyn was the Danish word
for farm. Hence Hodge's cyn.

And country people in Scandinavia tended to take their names from local holdings.

And someone of that stock studied medicine.
Hence Hodgkin's lymphoma. Lymph from the Latin
meant once "a pure clear spring of water."
Hence limpid. But it came to mean
the white cells of the blood.

Because the blood is a river too.

In Hardy's poem, the fallen drummer is in fact a native of "Wessex" rather than Lincolnshire, a casualty of the Boer War rather than the Anglo-Afghan War; his body lies in the veldt of South Africa rather than the steppes of Afghanistan. But poets take liberties; "spheres of influence" and the wars that sustain them tend to run together. A poet may be ruthless in his liberties: in the meandering path of etymology (Hodge's cyn), he hears a ghostly confirmation of the childhood cancer he "chose to imagine" as the vehicle for cutting off the childhood he chose to imagine behind the inscription on a title page. "She has (strong beat) / a Hodg (strong beat) kin's lym-phom (strong beat)-a": in the rhythms of a diagnosis, he hears the rhythms of a popular song "that the woman in Chicago / might have sung to her children as they fell asleep." This is the other woman, the one from San Salvador; the poet has let her children live. "Yo soy un hombre sincero," she sings. The words were written by the Cuban nationalist José Marti. The song, Guantanamera, became very popular for a time in the United States. People were protesting another war.

De quien son las piedras del rio
que ven tus ojos, habitante?

So—what are the river stones
that come swimming to your eyes, habitante?

A more literal translation of the question with which the ode began would hinge on a possessive: whose (not what) are the stones. But the present poet, troubled by empire, has chosen to forgo the possessive and, in one key term, to forgo translation altogether. The world belongs to those who dwell there: habitante. The language belongs to everyone through whom it has passed.

About the Author
Linda Gregerson's last collection of poetry, Waterborne, won the 2003 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her new book, Magnetic North, will be published by Houghton Mifflin later this year.

TriQuarterly
Northwestern University

Editor: Susan Firestone Hahn
Associate Editor: Ian Morris