The Tory: Perspectives and Poems: Dr Pratt Datta

My Young Son Asks Me by Bertolt Brecht

My Young Son Asks Me...

by Bertolt Brecht Translated by Burch

My young son asks me: Must I learn mathematics?
What is the use, I feel like saying. That two pieces
Of bread are more than one's about all you'll end up with.
My young son asks me: Must I learn French?
What is the use, I feel like saying. This State's collapsing.
And if you just rub your belly with your hand and
Groan, you'll be understood with little trouble.
My young son asks me: Must I learn history?

What is the use, I feel like saying. Learn to stick
Your head in the earth, and maybe you'll still survive.

Yes, learn mathematics, I tell him.
Learn your French, learn your history!

The Burning of the Books by Bertolt Brecht

The Burning of the Books
by Bertolt Brecht
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

When the Regime
commanded the unlawful books to be burned,
teams of dull oxen hauled huge cartloads to the bonfires.

Then a banished writer, one of the best,
scanning the list of excommunicated texts,
became enraged — he’d been excluded!

He rushed to his desk, full of contemptuous wrath,
to write fiery letters to the morons in power —
Burn me! he wrote with his blazing pen
Haven’t I always reported the truth?
Now here you are, treating me like a liar!
Burn me!

Prometheus by Goethe

Prometheus

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Cover thy spacious heavens, Zeus,
With clouds of mist,
And, like the boy who lops
The thistles' heads,
Disport with oaks and mountain-peaks,
Yet thou must leave
My earth still standing;
My cottage too, which was not raised by thee;
Leave me my hearth,
Whose kindly glow
By thee is envied.

I know nought poorer
Under the sun, than ye gods!
Ye nourish painfully,
With sacrifices
And votive prayers,
Your majesty:
Ye would e'en starve,
If children and beggars
Were not trusting fools.

While yet a child
And ignorant of life,
I turned my wandering gaze
Up tow'rd the sun, as if with him
There were an ear to hear my wailings,
A heart, like mine,
To feel compassion for distress.

Who help'd me
Against the Titans' insolence?
Who rescued me from certain death,
From slavery?
Didst thou not do all this thyself,
My sacred glowing heart?
And glowedst, young and good,
Deceived with grateful thanks
To yonder slumbering one?

I honour thee! and why?
Hast thou e'er lighten'd the sorrows
Of the heavy laden?
Hast thou e'er dried up the tears
Of the anguish-stricken?
Was I not fashion'd to be a man
By omnipotent Time,
And by eternal Fate,
Masters of me and thee?

Didst thou e'er fancy
That life I should learn to hate,
And fly to deserts,
Because not all
My blossoming dreams grew ripe?

Here sit I, forming mortals
After my image;
A race resembling me,
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy, to be glad,
And thee to scorn,
As I!

Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night

by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Demain des L'aube or Tomorrow at Dawn by Victor Hugo

“Demain dès l’aube” by Victor Hugo

Demain, dès l’aube, à l’heure où blanchit la campagne,
Je partirai. Vois-tu, je sais que tu m’attends.
J’irai par la forêt, j’irai par la montagne.
Je ne puis demeurer loin de toi plus longtemps.

Je marcherai les yeux fixés sur mes pensées,
Sans rien voir au dehors, sans entendre aucun bruit,
Seul, inconnu, le dos courbé, les mains croisées,
Triste, et le jour pour moi sera comme la nuit.

Je ne regarderai ni l’or du soir qui tombe,
Ni les voiles au loin descendant vers Harfleur,
Et quand j’arriverai, je mettrai sur ta tombe
Un bouquet de houx vert et de bruyère en fleur.

 

Translation 

 

Tomorrow, at dawn, in the hour when the countryside becomes white,
I will leave. You see, I know that you are waiting for me.
I will go by the forest, I will go by the mountain.
I cannot stay far from you any longer.

I will walk the eyes fixed on my thoughts,
Without seeing anything outside, nor hearing any noise,
Alone, unknown, the back curved, the hands crossed,
Sad, and the day for me will be like the night.

I will not look at the gold of the evening which falls,
Nor the faraway sails descending towards Harfleur.
And when I arrive, I will put on your tomb
A green bouquet of holly and flowering heather.

In Muted Tone by Paul Verlaine

In Muted Tone
By Paul Verlaine
Translated by Norman R. Shapiro

Gently, let us steep our love
In the silence deep, as thus,
Branches arching high above
Twine their shadows over us.

Let us blend our souls as one,
Hearts’ and senses’ ecstasies,
Evergreen, in unison
With the pines’ vague lethargies.

Dim your eyes and, heart at rest,
Freed from all futile endeavor,
Arms crossed on your slumbering breast,
Banish vain desire forever.

Let us yield then, you and I,
To the waftings, calm and sweet,
As their breeze-blown lullaby
Sways the gold grass at your feet.

And, when night begins to fall
From the black oaks, darkening,
In the nightingale’s soft call
Our despair will, solemn, sing.

Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte by Byron

ODE TO NAPOLEON BUONAPARTE

by Lord Byron with annotations from Peter Cochran

[Byron wrote the poem in several stages. The earliest manuscript (at Texas) was created on April 10th 1814, and contains stanzas 1, 4, 6-12, and 14-16; Byron then added stanzas 5, 13, 2, and 3 to it. Stanzas 17, 18 and 19 were written – so it used to be said – at the request of John Murray, to increase the size of the book and thus to avoid paying stamp tax on it. But Andrew Nicholson, in Napoleon’s ‘last act’ and Byron’s Ode, (Romanticism 9.1, 2003, p.68) writes that there was no such condition attached to stamp tax.
The Ode was published at high speed, first anonymously (with fifteen stanzas) on April 16th 1814. All editions from the third onwards have an additional stanza 5. Not until the twelfth edition does Byron’s name appear. Stanzas 17, 18, and 19 were not printed in Byron’s lifetime. Byron wanted to dedicate the poem to Hobhouse, but Hobhouse declined.]

 

“Expende Annibalem:—quot libras in duce summo
Invenies?——
JUVENAL, Sat.X.

“The Emperor Nepos13 was acknowledged by the Senate, by the Italians, and by the
Provincials of Gaul; his moral virtues, and military talents, were loudly celebrated; and those
who derived any private benefit from his government, announced in prophetic strains the
restoration of public felicity.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
“By this shameful abdication, he protracted his life a few years, in a very ambiguous state,
between an Emperor and an Exile, till————
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, vol. 6, p.220.

 

1.
’Tis done – but yesterday a King!
And armed with Kings to strive –
And now thou art a nameless thing:
So abject – yet alive!
Is this the Man of thousand thrones, 
Who strewed our earth with hostile bones,
And can he thus survive?
Since he, miscalled the Morning Star,
Nor man nor fiend hath fallen so far. –

2.
Ill-minded man! why scourge thy kind 
Who bowed so low the knee?
By gazing on thyself grown blind,
Thou taught’st the rest to see;
With might unquestioned – power to save –
Thine only gift hath been the grave 
To those that worshipped thee;
Nor till thy fall could mortals guess

12: “Put Hannibal in the scales: how many pounds will that peerless / General mark up today?” – tr.
Peter Green. The first of many references to historical and mythical over-reachers with which B. cuts
Napoleon down to size.
13: Julius Nepos, Emperor of the Western Roman Empire after it had ceased to exist. Killed by his own
men.
14: BYRON’S NOTE: Lucifer was Satan’s name before he rebelled and fell.
Ambition’s less than littleness! –

3.
Thanks for that lesson – it will teach
To after-warriors more 
Than high Philosophy can preach,
And vainly preached before.
That spell upon the minds of men
Breaks, never to unite again,
That led them to adore 
Those Pagod things of sabre-sway,
With fronts of brass, and feet of clay.

4.
The triumph, and the vanity,
The rapture of the strife * –
The earthquake-voice of Victory, 
To thee the breath of Life;
The sword, the sceptre, and that sway
Which Man seemed made but to obey,
Wherewith Renown was rife –
All quelled! – Dark Spirit! what must be 
The Madness of thy Memory!
* Certaminis guadia, the expression of Attila in his harangue to his army, previous to the
battle of Chalons, given in Cassiodorus.

5
The Desolator desolate!
The Victor overthrown!
The Arbiter of others’ fate
A Suppliant for his own!
Is it some yet imperial hope
That with such change can calmly cope,
Or dread of death alone?
To die a Prince – or live a slave –
Thy choice is most ignobly brave!

6.
He * who of old would rend the oak,
Dreamed not of the rebound;
Chained by the trunk he vainly broke –
Alone – how looked he round?
Thou, in the sternness of thy strength, 

15: Attila the Hun lost the battle of Challons (451 AD).
16: Received stanza 5 does not appear in the first editions.
17: Echoes Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes, 213-14: Condemn’d a needy Suppliant to wait, /
While Ladies interpose, and Slaves debate. A reference to Charles XII of Sweden, Johnson’s equivalent
to Juvenal’s Hannibal.
18: Napoleon attempted suicide while this poem was in proof stage.
An equal deed hast done at length,
And darker fate hast found:
He fell, the forest prowlers’ prey;
But thou must eat thy heart away!
* Milo.19

7.
The Roman, * when his burning heart 
Was slaked with blood of Rome,
Threw down the dagger – dared depart,
In savage grandeur, home. –
He dared depart in utter scorn
Of Men that such a yoke had borne, 
Yet left him such a doom!
His only glory was that hour
Of self-upheld abandoned power. –
And Earth hath spilt her blood for him,
Who thus can hoard his own!
And Monarchs bowed the trembling limb,
And thanked him for a throne!
Fair Freedom! we may hold thee dear,
When thus thy mightiest foes their fear
In humblest guise have shown.
Oh! ne’er may tyrant leave behind
A brighter name to lure mankind! 

11.
Thine evil deeds are writ in gore,
Nor written thus in vain –
Thy triumphs tell of fame no more,
Or deepen every stain:
If thou hadst died as Honour dies. 
Some new Napoleon might arise,
To shame the world again –
But who would soar the solar height,
To set in such a starless night?

12.
Weighed in the balance, hero dust 
Is vile as vulgar clay;
Thy scales, Mortality! are just
To all that pass away:
But yet methought the living great
Some higher sparks should animate, 
To dazzle and dismay:
Nor deem’d Contempt could thus make mirth
Of these, the Conquerors of the earth.

13.
And she, proud Austria’s mournful flower,
Thy still imperial bride;
How bears her breast the torturing hour?
Still clings she to thy side?
Must she too bend, must she too share
Thy late repentance, long despair,
Thou throneless Homicide? 
If still she loves thee, hoard that gem, –
’Tis worth thy vanished Diadem!
14.
Then haste thee to thy sullen Isle,
And gaze upon the Sea;
That element may meet thy smile –
It ne’er was ruled by thee!

22: Napoleon’s second wife, Maria Louisa, daughter of the Austrian Emperor.
23: Elba.
Or trace with thine all idle hand
In loitering mood upon the sand
That Earth is now as free!
That Corinth’s pedagogue hath now 
Transferred his by-word to thy brow. –

15.
Thou Timour! in his Captive’s cage *
What thoughts will there be thine,
While brooding in thy prisoned rage?
But one – “The World was mine!” 
Unless, like he of Babylon,
All Sense is with thy Sceptre gone,
Life will not long confine
That Spirit poured so widely forth –
So long obeyed – so little worth! 

* The cage of Bajazet, by order of Tamerlane.

16.
Or, like the thief of fire * from heaven,
Wilt thou withstand the shock?
And share with him, the unforgiven,
His vulture and his rock!
Foredoomed by God – by man accurst,
And that last act, though not thy worst,
The very Fiend’s arch mock; †
He in his fall preserved his pride,
And, if a mortal, had as proudly died!

* Prometheus.
† “The fiend’s arch mock—
“To lip a wanton, and suppose her chaste.”—
Shakespeare.29
There was a day – there was an hour, 

24: English naval victories, particularly those of Nelson, had destroyed French naval power.
25: Dionysus the Younger of Syracuse, the tyrant whom Plato tried to tutor, was expelled from the city
and set himself up as a schoolteacher in Corinth.
26: Nebuchadnezzar.
27: BYRON’S NOTE: Legend has it that, upon defeating him, Tamburlaine the Great imprisoned
Bajazet, the Turkish Emperor, in a travelling cage. Byron parallels Bajazet with Napoleon and
Tamburlaine with Wellington.
28: BYRON’S NOTE: Prometheus, who was punished by Zeus for stealing fire from Heaven and
giving it to Man. Fastened to a rock, he was visited daily by a vulture which ate his liver. B. wrote the
following at some time in 1814, addressed to Napoleon, and referring to Prometheus:
Unlike the offence, though like would be the fate,
His to give life, but thine to desolate;
He stole from Heaven the flame, for which he fell,
Whilst thine was stolen from the native Hell. (CPW III 269)
29: BYRON’S NOTE: Iago’s words at Othello, IV i 70-1.
While earth was Gaul’s – Gaul thine –
When that immeasurable power
Unsated to resign
Had been an act of purer fame
Than gathers round Marengo’s name
And gilded thy decline,
Through the long twilight of all time,
Despite some passing clouds of crime.

18.
But thou forsooth must be a King
And don the purple vest, 
As if that foolish robe could wring
Remembrance from thy breast.
Where is that faded garment? where
The gewgaws thou wert fond to wear,
The star,31 the string, the crest? 
Vain froward child of Empire! say,
Are all thy playthings snatched away?
19.
Where may the wearied eye repose
When gazing on the Great;
Where neither guilty glory glows, 
Nor despicable state?
Yes – One – the first – the last – the best –
The Cincinnatus of the West,
Whom Envy dared not hate,
Bequeathed the name of Washington, 
To make man blush there was but one!]

30: Napoleon won the battle of Marengo in 1800.
31: For second thoughts here, see On the Star of the Legion of Honour (printed below).
32: Lucius Quinctius Cincinattus was always being called from his farm to rule Rome, and always
returning. B. would have us see Washington as a similarly austere Republican hero, unlike Napoleon.
33: The following two spurious stanzas were printed in The Morning Chronicle of April 27th 1814:

20.
Yes! better to have stood the storm,
A Monarch to the last!
Although that heartless fireless form
Had crumbled in the blast:
Than stoop to drag out Life’s last years,
The nights of terror, days of tears
For all the splendour past;
Then, – after ages would have read
Thy awful death with more than dread.

21.
A lion in the conquering hour!
In wild defeat a hare!
Thy mind hath vanished with thy power,
For Danger brought despair.
The dreams of sceptres now depart,
And leave thy desolated heart
The Capitol of care!
Dark Corsican, ’tis strange to trace

Be Drunk by Charles Baudelaire

Be Drunk

Charles Baudelaire, 1821 - 1867

You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”

The Hippopotamus by T.S. Eliot

The Hippopotamus

by TS Eliot

Similiter et omnes revereantur Diaconos, ut mandatum Jesu Christi; et Episcopum, ut Jesum Christum, existentem filium Patris; Presbyteros autem, ut concilium Dei et conjunctionem Apostolorum. Sine his Ecclesia non vocatur; de quibus suadeo vos sic habeo.
                                     S. Ignatii Ad Trallianos.

And when this epistle is read among you, cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans.

THE BROAD-BACKED hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh and blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.

The hippo’s feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends, 
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.

The ’potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree;
But fruits of pomegranate and peach 
Refresh the Church from over sea.

At mating time the hippo’s voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
But every week we hear rejoice
The Church, at being one with God. 

The hippopotamus’s day
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way—
The Church can sleep and feed at once.

I saw the ’potamus take wing 
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.

Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold, 
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.

He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr’d virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below 
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.

 

La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats

La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad

By John Keats

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her Elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!’

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.