LINES WRITTEN IN DEJECTION, JANUARY 19, 2021.
The tweets are calm tonight.
The vote is bull, and so unfair
And full of hate. On coastal elites the light
Gleams. So wrong … The cliffs of Alabama stand
Glimmering and vast, ready to vote another day.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of fake
Media, where scum weave their grand
Conspiracies against me …
Listen! You hear the grating roar
Of traitors, which a red wave will draw back, and fling,
In 2024, into the desert sand.
O sorrow cease! And then again begin
With tremulous cadence slow, to bring
A future dawn of gladness in.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
November 21st, 2020 at 11:39AM
As Mara-a-Lago becomes Dover Beach – or else must*
*”And Juda becomes New Haven or else must” Stevens, Ordinary Evening in New Haven.
November 21st, 2020 at 1:33PM
Greg: Yes! As a Wallace Stevens fan, I’ve also been looking into the post-Trump-melancholy possibilities in his work. Ordinary Evening is good; I’m thinking Sunday Morning, with its restlessly idle, vaguely subtropical, point of view/setting, would also work well to capture Trump’s psychology. Those “pungent oranges,” etc., etc.
November 21st, 2020 at 2:02PM
How about “yet the [would be} general[issimo] was rubbish in the end.” Notes Canto III. Though it was true from the start.
I have no idea what “or else must” means i OE. Stevens presents me with great beauty, wit, and puzzles I’ll never fully fathom, even with the help of Vendler, Eleanor Cook etc. As with Lincoln, he is a deus ex machina down from who knows where.
Anyway Cantos 29-31 of Ordinary Evening are my favs.
Just a quick drop in on account of what WS might appreciate as a possible change in our climate.
Best,
Greg